Hard Disk Question (strange)

mewso

I recently built my new PC and I took the 2 * 120Gig Seagate HDs I had originally setup as RAID on the old PC, put them in the new build but decided to go without RAID this time.
Now for some strange reason the first disk appears to have 240Gig and the second drive is also there with the expected 120Gig. I only noticed this after re-installing windows on a partition on disk 0. So I have windows installed on c which is approx 50 Gig and the next partition has 178Gig approx followed by the second physical disk of 120Gig.
I'm confused by this. There is no compression on the first disk according to Windows and it's all running fine. I plan to open the machine up tonight just to visibly confirm it's supposed to be a 120Gig drive because I'm thinking maybe I got a larger one by mistake when I bought it.
Very odd.

8T8

Well I would think the answer is they sent you the wrong drive a bigger model like a 250GB and after formatting it rounds out at roughly 240 free space available.

What does the bios say ?

mewso

Hmmm bios says I it's 120Gig. 2 * 120Gig as expected. There must be some kind of compression going on.

mewso

Further examination shows it to be an extended partition which is apparently essentially the total space bar the primary. (120-50) + 120) = 190 (approx. correct). How I ended up with this and how it now shows as a drive letter (surely it will not actually let me put more than say 70Gig on it?) I don't know.

8T8

Something may be wrong the the extended partition it should not report 170GB if that is the case.

In the Windows disk management console I would delete the existing 170GB partition and create a new extended/logical partition in it's place & see if that corrects it.

mewso

Tried that already. See attached pic. you'll notice disk 0 is 223.57Gig which I suspect is the total of both drives like some kind of warped RAID mode but of course disk 1 below is the correct capacity for the second drive (ignore the other disk it's an external). So the C drive is caught in whatever balls up I managed from the start.
So when I delete this 178gig partition and try to create a new one it still lets me create up to 178Gigs from it.

8T8

Okay that is weird

If it where me I would not risk running such a configuration and remove all partitions on the drive & re-install Windows on a single partition that uses the entire drive.

If the problem persists with a single primary partition on the drive then I'm not sure what's going on, I would try clearing the CMOS to make sure nothing is miss-configured in the bios.

joshcork

Yes delete all and start again, reset the bios and if still same flash bios see if this has any effect.

mewso

Yeah I have ordered a 320Gig which is due any day so I might wait and re-install on that and use these 2 as extras. Thanks.

SwampThing

Did you have these disks as a RAID 0 in the old machine? If so, depending on how you wiped them, the RAID config could possible be still in the boot partition of the disk and is being read by Windows Disk Manager etc. etc. Seems to add up - 2 x 120GB in RAID 0 -> 240GB

I'd hazard a guess that if you swapped the disks around (swap primary and slave) reinstalled Windows, you'd get the same thing - primary disk reported as 240GB and secondary, correctly, as 120GB.

Ideally, you should destroy the RAID setup on the machine you're taking the drives from before putting them into something else. It's not critical, but more good practice.

Anyway - it's not the end of the world. Could you try Ghosting or 'Acronis-ing' the partition, wipe the drive (fdisk or delpart) and restore the partition - might solve it.