I have an old Seagate hdd, 214 megs that I was cleaning up to use as an extra in one of my older units. The bios says it's a 214 meg, same as the manufacturer info on it. When I fdisk and format, however, it comes up as only 203 megs. When starting the machine from it, bios once again reports it as 214 megs, yet dos insists it is only 203. Is it possible there is a hidden partition which both diskzero and fdisk missed, or is it more likely to be reporting 11 megs less due to a whole lot of bad sectors? Any opinions appreciated! You don't have to be realistic to be cynical, but you DO have to be cynical to be realistic!

Wipe the drive with KILLDISK http://www.killdisk.com/

214,000,000 bytes =~ 204 MB where MB = 1024^2 You lose a little more after formatting. If you want to check multiply heads, cylinders, sectors, 512 bytes per sector for total bytes.

Thanks Roger & Fred - I'll try KILLDISK. Seagate drive Params are: CYLINDERS = 1024 HEADS = 12 SECTORS = 34 That should come out to 213,909,504 I understand losing a little in formatting, so maybe 5% of the drive isn't so much ... it seems like a lot of missing space, though. Thanks again. You don't have to be realistic to be cynical, but you DO have to be cynical to be realistic!

I don't believe there's anything to gain by wiping the drive - as fred pointed out, it's the disparity caused by perceiving 1Kb as 1000 bytes when actually it's 1024. 213,909,504 is rounded up to 214 Unformatted capacity is something else again (and quite a bit more than 5% - formatted is about ¾ of unformatted - a 'loss' of 25%) Click

213909504/1048576=204 exactly. Should get about 203 MB after format with 4 KB clusters. Best