kfoss Posted May 31, 2005 Report Share Posted May 31, 2005 I have recently installed a Maxtor 160GB SATA HDD and created a 10GB system partition and a 150GB partition for saving recorded TV shows. The 150GB partition only shows as 136GB after being created and formatted. Is there still a 136GB limited to harddrives in Linux? Missing 14GB is pretty significant...10%+ of the capacity... Ideas? Kevin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted May 31, 2005 Report Share Posted May 31, 2005 afaik it does not depend on linux but on your mobo. i have a rather old qdi-legend motherboard (year 1998) and it supports my 160gb hdd's. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted May 31, 2005 Report Share Posted May 31, 2005 (edited) 160 billion bytes/(1024)(1024)(1024) = 149GB by my calculation which is the actual size of the drive in binary. I think your running into the old hard drive manufacturers' scam of using decimal rather binary size designations. Take out about 10GB from that for your other partition and you have 139GB left. If your using a journalling filesystem there's probably another 1 or 2% out of that for the journal record which is excluded from the partition size since the space is reserved for journalling(i.e. can't be written to by the user). That brings you down to about 136GB. Re bios hard drive size limits - there much less of a problem in linux than windows. Once the kernel loads, linux kisses the bios aand its hard drive size limits good bye so as long as you have the kernel within the bios size limit so it can load your OK. Linux will see the entire drive once booted. Windows will not if the bios is size limited; windows is much more bound to bios size limit than linux. Edited May 31, 2005 by pmpatrick Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kfoss Posted June 1, 2005 Author Report Share Posted June 1, 2005 Thanks, I know that the BIOS recognizes the 160GB, as I am able to see it in the BIOS SATA listing as 160GB, thouh this is probably the BIOS reading from some data stored on the drive's circuits. I am, in MDK10.0 able to see the drive in the partition manager and it says 160GB. PMPatrick, you are riight though. I actually have a Western Digital SATA, not Maxtor drive. I also have another ATA100 160GB by WD and when I look at it's drive capacity, you got it...it only adds up to 146GB just like to new one. So my question now is, if I buy a 200GB or larger HDD, will I need to split it up into partitions or will MDK 10.0 and my Asus A8V (current generation AMD64 board) let me keep is a one large partition? Ideas? Thanks for all the input so far! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted June 1, 2005 Report Share Posted June 1, 2005 There's no hardware or OS limitation here that I can see so the only restriction on partition size should be those imposed by the filesystem you use. For most reasonably recent versions of linux filesystems(reiserfs, ext3, etc) the size limits on the partition are measured in TB not GB so that shouldn't be a problem. FAT16 and FAT32 are different; IIRC FAT16 is limited to 2GB partitions and FAT32 is limited to 128GB. NTFS is in the TB range as well but you wouldn't be using that in linux. The 200GB drives advertised by the hard drive manufacturers are actually about 186GB binary by the way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted June 2, 2005 Report Share Posted June 2, 2005 I have a external usb2 apparently 160gb hdd which is only 149 too :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted June 2, 2005 Report Share Posted June 2, 2005 Simple mathematics: One kilobyte is 1024 bytes, one megabyte is 1024 kilobytes, and one gigabyte is 1024 megabytes. Do the above calculations, and you'll find out why an 160.000.000.000 bytes HD is "smaller" when referring to gigabytes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.