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Subject: My Hard Drive seems to be smaller that what it is supposed to be
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Tech Article Number: WBTA14000543

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Hard Drive manufacturers rate the capacity of their Hard Drives differently than DOS or Windows does. Under DOS or Windows 1 K is really 1024 bytes and 1 M or Meg is 1048576 bytes. But to a Hard Drive manufacturer 1 K is 1K. Lets look at some examples.

4 gig Hard Drive is being reported by Windows 95 as being only 3910 M bytes in size. Which is correct, but to find the actual bytes we need to multiply that 3910 M bytes by 1048576 to find the total. That figure after multiplying is 4099932160 which is in excess of 4 gig by 99932160 or roughly 100 meg.

3 gig drives actually come out to 3211788288 bytes.

5 gig drives come out to 5000749056

Curious as to what your drive really is. Boot your computer to Windows. Choose the option to restart your computer in MS Dos mode or if using Win 3.1 then just exit Windows. While at a DOS prompt type FDISK and press enter. Tell it to enable large disk support if prompted and continue to the FDISK program. Once in FDISK choose option 4 to view the drive specifications. You should see a C drive and a NON-Dos partition. The sizes listed there need to be multiplied by the below conversion factors to make total bytes of the drive. After viewing the drive sizes simply use the ESC key to exit the FDISK program and to get back to the prompt. You may then restart your computer.

1 M= 1048576 bytes 1 K = 1024 bytes


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