Disk size is incorrect

Hi everyone,

My 200 GB hard drive is only showing up as ~128 GB on any operating system. It's an external firewire drive. I installed it into the enclosure myself. I'm assuming that I did something wrong but I don't know what. I set the jumper to master before I installed it, but I didn't know if there were any other settings I should look for. There was a lot of corruption to the data when I plugged it in (presumably because suddenly >%25 of the medium dissappeared), most of which I was able to recover after using e2fsck. Any ideas?

Thanks, Brad

Were all 200 GB ever recognized? What file system type is it (I'm guessing ext2/3 since you used e2fsck)?

I think it used to show up as ~180 gb. I remember when I bought the disk, the manual said I would need to do something to enable the full 200 GB, but I assumed it was a M$ thing. The drive was ext3 before. I thought that formatting the disk might fix the problem, so, using gparted I formatted to reiserfs. No luck. My disk-admin freezes on startup (related?) so I can't use it. I have given up and deleted any partitions, hoping a genius on these boards can show me the way! :) Just to reiterate: in gparted and in windows disk manager the disk appears to be ~128.

180 GB sounds about for a so called 200 GB drive, the old 1024 vs 1000 k problem.

i remember reading somewhere that certain file systems ( i think it was FAT and VFAT) that only allow partition sizes up to a certain size. if u specify a partition size thats over this amount it will only show up as the maximum allowed size. i dont know if this is your problem or not but i know it has been an issue with HDDs and FSs

When hard drives fail is it usually an all or nothing situation, or do single platters die? I did bang it up a little bit as I was moving it so I wonder if a single disk could have failed. Is that possible?

I have no idea what I'm talking about but: The original ATA specification used a 28-bit addressing mode. This allows for the addressing of 268,435,456 512-byte sectors (128 GiB or 137 GB).

so.. maybe the hardware in my enclosure is old? That would explain it, because it worked fine internally. I guess now I know another important spec. to look for. :)

I have no idea what I'm talking about but:

actually, VERY good call! I just switched this hard drive into a different enclosure and the whole ~200 GB show up! The funny thing is that my old (1.5 years) USB 2.0 enclosure supports the big size, but my new (2 weeks old) Firewire enclosure doesn't. :confused: But, no matter. All is good for me! Thanks, Simon!:D