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Formatting an ENTIRE hard drive

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by mannee1

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The properties of my external hard drive show a larger capacity then when I view it in Disk Management. How can I format the ENTIRE hard drive? When I format it, it only give me the option to format the lesser of the 2. And even booting up with a Windows cd, it only shows the the lesser of the 2 amounts to create a partition for.

If anybody knows if this has been discussed elsewhere on this site, you may just supply me with the link.

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by thechas

The difference has to do with Decimal versus Binary bytes.

It is the same reason that Windows shows a smaller capacity for a hard drive than what the drive manufacture specifies.

Each GB of a hard drive is 1,073,741,824 decimal bytes.

If you multiply the size that Disk Manager shows for your drive in GB by 1,073,741,824, you should get a number very close to the number of Bytes that are shown for the drive under properties.

Chas

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