I'm going though the usual rigmarole of installing a tasty newer and bigger hard drive into my Tablo (HP TC1100 tablet).
The setup on my current 100GB drive had started playing up and my preference is to go with a fresh installation from scratch - none of this ghost image malarky for me.
I'd had my eye on the newish perpendicular recording technology and saw that it was now available in 160GB form at a reasonable cost. Of the two models available from Seagate and Hitachi, the Seagate was in stock and I put in my order.
On fitting the drive into the PC and formatting I was surprised to see only 137GB registering. This seemed decidedly low even taking into account the 'binary calculation adjustment' which should have yielded 149GB (or 152,590MB or 156,250,000KB).
Having gone ahead with the full Windows installation and loaded in all the software, a bit of scouting around finally revealed the problem - most BIOSs will only partition a maximum 137GB. The only way to get around this is to format using either a special boot-disc or by using Windows XP itself to format. Since I had no special boot disc but did have a spare PC running XP, I was able to format the full quota of GB and thus free up another not unhealthy 20GB.
3 comments:
Good old BIOS, they don't call it Basic for nothing.
I like the fact that in 200x, when they where building the tablet BIOS, they still thought, "we will never need more than 640k of memory" or was it "137Gb of disk"!
Then again who the smeg writes an OS installer that trusts the BIOS!
Modern operating systems thank the BIOS for loading it into memory then proceded to identify properly all the internal hardware for themselves.
Still it won't be long before things are done properly:
LinuxBIOS
john
I thoght it was just a marketing ploy, where you think you are getting a nice 160Gb drive where Gb means 1000 not 1024.
I got annoyed on discovering that my 4.7GB DVDs were actually only 4.37GB.. it was then that I discovered the wonders of Gibi Bytes vs Giga Bytes...annoyingly enough tradition has it that they both use the shorthand GB, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte soon enlightened me to the wonders of GiB vs GB but now we have to wait for the rest of the world to catch up.
I wouldn't mind so much but they measure HDD and DVDs in GB, CDs in MiB but a 1.44 floppy is actually a mixture being 1440 KiB or 1.44kKiB!
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