On 17/06/06, Keith G. Robertson-Turner <fedora-gmane.00002@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Dotan Cohen wrote: > One good thing that I can say about the Maxtor drive is that 160 GB > turned out to be a little over 163 usable gigabytes. The 160 GB WD > unit has about 152 usable gigabytes of storage. Well that pretty much confirms it was a drive geometry error. Formatted (usable) drive space is (without exception) *never* *more* than the quoted capacity ... *ever*. Apart from the fact that manufactures always use the decimal 1000x rather than 1024x figures for quoted capacities, which makes them look (in the advertising) bigger than they actually are, once the drive has a disklabel and filesystem on it, the capacity is reduced even further by the overhead. So the fact that the partitioning software (fdisk or whatever) was reporting a larger available capacity than the quoted capacity, means AFAIAC that the geometry was being reported incorrectly. Maybe the drive doesn't properly support LBA (which would be unusual nowadays), maybe the mobo BIOS had the CHS value set manually (you should check that it's on "auto"), who knows. I know that figure *has* to be wrong though.
Sounds logical. That was the capacity reported on the Fedora install CD when I got to partitioning, and I think Ubuntu as well. Dotan Cohen http://what-is-what.com 03
