BIOS Reports wrong HD size

[Beetle B.]

I have a Maxtor 40 GB drive (5T0H04 or something like that).

A while ago, I noticed that the BIOS reported it as having only about 33 GB, whereas Windows (98) continued to report it as 40 GB - I don't know if the BIOS was always like this.

Recently, my Windows died, and I was formatting the whole drive. When I ran fdisk, it couldn't detect the partition type, but it also "saw" 40 GB. However, when I deleted the old partition, and tried creating new ones, it now only sees 33GB.

I installed Windows (98), but it also only sees 33 GB.

Any ideas?

The BIOS is set to autodetect. I tried entering parameters manually, but it didn't change anything.

Thanks,

[bailey]

its mostly a math thing
the drive is ok

[doctorgonzo]

You might be looking at flashing your BIOS. Go to your board manufacturer's website and check to see if an updated BIOS is available. Getting the latest BIOS version fixes many problems of this type.

[imbest123]

33.1 Gb is what the drive should be reporting at. Like Bailey said its a math thing. My 40Gb hd reports as 33.1 Gb. When the company makes the drive they mean that 1 gb equals 1 billion bytes instead of whatever it really is.

[doctorgonzo]

The difference seems to be too big for the HD math issue, though. 40,000,000,000 bytes (40 GB to manufacturers) is 37.25 GB to Windows (1,073,741,824 bytes in a GB). 33.1 GB in Windows would be 35,540,854,374 bytes.

[morriswindgate]

Go to the Maxtor website and download/run the Max-Blast Utility to make sure the drive is OK.

[spf36200]

same problem

i have 2 maxtor 60 gb hard drives

windows reports the first as 61 gb and the second as 32 gb

when i was setting up my raid bios it was detecting the second one as 32gb still. so idk whats wrong

[DragonNOA1]

I had a drive like that with an extended partition that was not formated with nothing on it. Make sure you are formatting the WHOLE disk not just the C: drive. Partition Magic is good for seeing everything.