Electronics Forum / Electronics / April 2004

Possibly a bios issue?

It is normal for a 120GB drive to show a bit less than than 120Gb when
the operating system reports its size.

111Gb is the size you would expect to be reported for a 120Gb Drive.

This is for 2 reasons :

First, a gigabyte is not defined in the same way by all people. Some
define it as 1000 Mb but others define it as 1024Mb.

Note that 1024 is 2 raised to the power 10 and this is a reflection of
the binary and hexdecimal conventions used in computers. The same
applies to 1Kb. It's not actually 1000 bytes - it is 1024 bytes.

Second, a certain amount of hard disk space is used up in formatting
overheads used by the operating system and hardware, so not all the
space on the drive is available to the end user.

Like I said, 111Gb is exactly what you would expect to see for a 120Gb
drive. I have 3 hard disks on my computer :

Disc 1 is 200Gb but reported as 189Gb by Windows XP
Disc 2 is 120Gb but reported as 111Gb
Disc 3 is 120Gb but reported as 111Gb

I have no idea why the drive was first reported as 40Mb. This is an
error of some kind. It could be BIOS or the operating system or the
jumper configuration in the drive.

Hope this helps.

Gaz