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250GB HD shows up in Finder as 128GB

C

CrzyCanuck72

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jun 10, 2003
913
0
Hi,

I have a 250GB external harddrive that's showing up in Finder (and Disk Utility) as only a 128 GB harddrive...this has been happening on and off for a while (ie. sometimes it'll show as 250, sometimes as 128), but ever since running a disk repair (and just recently running Disk Warrior), it stays at 128. Any ideas why?
 
sorry, it's a G4 eMac (1.25 gHz, 1 GB RAM) running OS 10.4.7. It's a 250 GB drive in an external USB enclosure.
 
Was this case bought as a ready-made solution with this hard disk already inside?
 
No, the HD & enclosure were bought seperately, and I assembled them. Again, it worked for 6 months as a 250 GB drive, and has only started to show as 128 GB recently, as I started getting more "Error -36"s, and after I repaired the disk and ran Disk Warrior.
 
ok, I'm not entirely sure...it's a "Bytecc 3.5" External Sub System" enclosure...not sure of the model number either.
 
i think its because, the g4 processors can not support more than 128gb per hard drive.
Thats a system limit
 
a bit of Googling shows that there is a 128 GB limit on drives for "older-model G4s." Would this apply to the 1.25 eMac? And is it applicable to external drives, too? And why was it showing up for 6 months as a 250 GB drive?
 
That's only for internal drives, not for FireWire/USB.

And FYI, it's a driver issue. It can be worked around with the Intech Hi Cap driver, but one can boot only from a partition under the 128GiB border because of the firmware (I have a 320GB drive in my Cube).
 
BTW, you can format and see a disk as > 128GiB with something that does not support it, and you will only notice the problem when you try to write past the limit (corruption).
 
I'm not interested in booting from this drive, I'm only using it as storage, and it's connected by USB right now, not Firewire...
 
The booting thing was about the internal drive limit.

An USB bridge also needs to be ATA-6 compatible to support big disks
 
cube said:
BTW, you can format and see a disk as > 128GiB with something that does not support it, and you will only notice the problem when you try to write past the limit (corruption).
Click to expand...

That very well could be it then, because I am getting close to that limit, and it's only been giving me issues lately...how can I overcome this? A new enclosure?
 
Doesn't it have a part/serial number written somewhere? Contact this Bytecc
to ask if it supports big drives.
 
the model number is on the box, which I don't have with me...I think I found the model on their website, and it says it supports up to 500GB HDs.
 
If they say "upto 500GB" it probably means even much bigger disks, just that 500GB was the biggest size available when that was tested/written.
 
right...so we're back to square one, then? Do you think a new enclosure might help, or is it a system issue?
 
Well, I don't know. You did a disk repair and went with DiskWarrior so maybe you messed up the disk and it's not the enclosure's fault. Although what you said that it would show different sizes intermittently...

Do you have a backup?
 
nope, no backup...it's all my movies, music, and photos. I have no DVD burner, so it's difficult to make a backup...
 
Go to the terminal and do:

Code: 
disktool -l

Find the line with the volume name and get the device name from there
('disk<something>'), for example 'disk1'.

Then do (with disk1 as an example)

Code: 
sudo pdisk /dev/disk1 -dump

and post here the result.

Actually, you don't need to post. The size of the partition should appear in parentheses.
 
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