Hi,

I'm putting together a new machine for my office work. I chose a 160GB HD and Win2000. When I go to install Windows it only sees 131070GB on the drive and only lets me partition 131062GB and reserves another 8 for partition info. I know drive capacities are rounded off, but something doesn't add up.

Oddly, in the reviews for the HD I looked at before buying, I saw that someone mentioned this very issue. Why does this happen? Is there a way around it? I don't really need the missing space, but it feels weird not to use what is there.

Thanks guys! :)

I *THINK* (and am probably wrong) that it is a marketing issue. Some companies will brand hard drives with 160,000 megs as 160 gigs. But there are really 1,024 megs in a gig, not a flat 1,000, so that consumes some of those missing megs. Additionally, depending upon the file system you choose for the partition, you are using up megs to store file info (NTFS in particular, I believe?)

Take what I say with a grain of salt. I am really not sure ...

Thanks. I understand that, but the numbers still don't add up as I figure it???

I guess they sold you a 140GB hard drive and they said it's 160GB. You can verify that this is not a glich in the Windows Setup by going into BIOS and verifying the drive information in there.

For a 160GB drive you should show 156,672 MB in Windows Setup

According to the BIOS it's a 163GB drive. That fits with the math of 160GB x 1024 bytes = 163.84GB

There sure seems to be something with Windows 2000 being the cause of this issue.

Now I'm more determined to resolve this!

Anyone have an answer????? :eek:

You could try an FDisk. Use a bootable floppy and make 2 primary partitions each 80GB and then see if the 2k setup lets you install it. It is very possible that it doesn't support more than a specific size.

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