Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests 5Gb 'secret' area in 80 Gig drives???

I have just built my first computer and all the stuff works. Solved the loading problem with help from SquareRootGuy, and now I have a mysterious problem. On each 80Gig Maxtor hard drive the first 63 sectors are "unavailable" I can "see" them via a hardrive program, but the area is not responding to any probes. Formatting starts at sector 64... and the drive says I have only 74.some Gigs... When I got the drives they each gave 80 gigs, now the give only 74Gigs and the mysterious locked up 5 Gigs.
I have NO internet access at home yet so it can't be something like a Virus???
Any ideas???

For most drive vendors 1M = 1000000 bytes. However, to everyone else in the computer world, 1M is 1048576 bytes and 1G is 1024 times that.

Take that value and multiply by 74 and you are very close to 80,000,000,000

So that's probably a good chunk of your missing 5gb.

There are all sorts of "lies" and "magic" on modern drives.

The whole notion of a fixed number of sectors/track, for instance. In reality, the geometry of a drive varies as you move from the outer edge of the platter towards the center.

However, modern, integrated controllers on the drive (where do you think the term IDE comes from?) hide the drives physical geometry and simply presents a logical uniform geometry that adds up to a capacity similar, but sometimes lower than the raw capacity of the drive.

IIRC, the term for that is Zone Bit Recording, or you might search for drive zoning to get a more detailed explaination.

FWIW,

TB

The first 64 sectors could be for MBR or some left over sectors. Not too familiar with that.

But fact is you will never have a true 80GB partition on a 80GB hard drive.

Because the size of the hard drive is actually
80,000,000,000 Bytes but 80GB in computer terms is
109,951,162,7776 Bytes or so....your 74GB would be
79,456,894,967 Bytes which is tiny bit less than
80,000,000,000 Bytes.

So there.

yeah the other thing is, especially if you used fat32, formatting the drive uses a certain amount of space on the drive. IE: you might have a 20 gb drive but have 19.XX free...

http://www.storagereview.com/guide/guide_index.html

Pretty much covers everything you would want to know about hard drives and alot of what you wouldn't :p .

Thanks again!!!
Golly you car guys are geniuses!!!!

Yep, since you probably formatted it with FAT32, the file system's overhead requires "extra" space. If you where to use EXT2 you might get a little more out of it.

Find out what the vendor says "1Gig" is. If it's 1000MB, then they are wrong. It is really 1024MB. It's a marketing way of selling you a 74G drive as an 80G drive. Quite a crock if you ask me.