Hi, everyone. I have a Dell Dimension 8100 with that came with a 20GB Seagate hard drive. I recently added a 60GB Western Digital hard drive, and made the original master. I tried transferring the data on the original to the new drive using the software that came with the WD drive, but kept running into problems. Finally, I just gave up. But now, Windows ME is showing that drive 1's capacity is only 18GB, drive 2's 55GB, and when I put a floppy disk in, it says that there's only 1.38MB of space available on it. I checked the BIOS settings, and everything is listed correctly. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can fix this? I'd appreciate any help. Thanks, Kary

First, a 20 gig drive does not contain 20 gig. The manufacturers call 1 gig 1,000,000,000 bytes when a gig is really 1,073,741,824 bytes. If you divide 20,000,0000,000 by a real gig, you get 18.6. The same would hold true for the other drive. Once a drive is formatted, you may lose space as well. You may also need a bios update to use the new drive.

This is normal. It is because of the different ways that vendors and windows interpret the sizes. Vendors like WD use 1000 for the number of bytes in a kilobytes, while windows uses 1024 byter per kilobyte. I did the number crunching for you. vendor windows reports 1.44 MB 1.38 MB 20 GB 19.07 GB 60 GB 55.88 GB To see for yourself, take the number the vendor says and multilply by 1000 to get the number of bytes (example: 1.44 MB * 1000 = # of kilobytes * 1000 = # of bytes), then take that number and divide by 1024 the same # of times you multiplied by 1000. To finish the example 1.44*1000*1000 = 1440000 bytes 1440000/1024/1024 = 1.373 MB Hope this helps. Wolfgang

Thanks so much for getting back to me, guys (and thanks, Wolfgang, for going to all that trouble). But (and I apologize if I'm being stupid here), when I format a diskette, the capacity is listed as 1.44MB. Is that just a contradiction in Windows ME that no one picked up on? I've been trying to create a Linux boot disk. The file I need is 1.40MB, and Windows keeps saying it won't fit on a diskette. A friend at work suggested I disconnet the new hard drive and floppy drive and experiment by rebooting and reconnecting them. Before I do this, I'm hoping someone can suggest something that requires less effort. Thanks!

floppies have a 1.38MB capacity. use windows explorer to navigate to the 3.5 drive and on the left it shows you the capacity of the floppy inserted. i dont know much about math but this probably falls along the lines of what the others mentioned about manufacturers calling 18.6GB 20GB. As far as the linux boot disk. When installing linux it should have prompted you to create a boot disk. LILO is what i use and was created during installation of SuSE linux. Is this 1.40 file a setup.exe or self extracting zip? Maybe you need to extract whats in this file to the disk.

This utility should help you get the file onto a disk http://www.asplinux.ru/en/docs/diskette.shtml all you do is supply the path and the drive that you want the info to go on. I had the same problem with a solaris 8 startup disk