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Macbook won't recognize full capacity of IDE HD from old PC (in an enclosure)

D

d'evils

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 31, 2007
12
0
England
Was gonna buy an external HD but already had a spare 160gb IDE drive, so bought a USB2/Firewire enclosure instead (for IDE+SATA).

Disk Utility only sees 31.5gb of it. It was originally NTFS, but I've formatted it as MS-DOS, and as MAC OS but it still only sees 31.5gb.

I tried formatting it in my brother's PC to FAT32 (actually inside the PC case, not the enclosure). back in the mac it then appeared in Disk Utility as 31.5gb, but with 150gb available. That would be ok i suppose, but it doesn't work in the PC via USB/Firewire!!

Can someone help?
 
I've gone through similar steps as you and haven't had a problem with any enclosure or drive.

If I was to shoot at it in the dark, I'd say bad enclosure.
 
d'evils said:
Was gonna buy an external HD but already had a spare 160gb IDE drive, so bought a USB2/Firewire enclosure instead (for IDE+SATA).

Disk Utility only sees 31.5gb of it. It was originally NTFS, but I've formatted it as MS-DOS, and as MAC OS but it still only sees 31.5gb.

I tried formatting it in my brother's PC to FAT32 (actually inside the PC case, not the enclosure). back in the mac it then appeared in Disk Utility as 31.5gb, but with 150gb available. That would be ok i suppose, but it doesn't work in the PC via USB/Firewire!!

Can someone help?
Click to expand...

I might be wrong but when you formatted it on your brothers PC did you see the size that it was formatting to? If you used windows it has a maximum size of 31.5g for FAT32. Could you re-partition & format it in Mac os ?
 
butaro said:
I might be wrong but when you formatted it on your brothers PC did you see the size that it was formatting to? If you used windows it has a maximum size of 31.5g for FAT32. Could you re-partition & format it in Mac os ?
Click to expand...

I used a program I downloaded from the HD manufacturer to format it in the PC because I was aware of that Windows FAT32 formatting limitation. It said FAT32 150GB.

Whenever I try to format it in OS X in any type of file system in only gives me 31.5gb.

iDuck said:
If I was to shoot at it in the dark, I'd say bad enclosure.
Click to expand...

:(

I could live with it, as the old HD was probably gonna be trashed or never used again, and the enclosure wasn't too expensive. But it's annoying yaknow.
 
d'evils said:
Whenever I try to format it in OS X in any type of file system in only gives me 31.5gb.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you didn't get a full 150GB partition.

Try to repartition it with Disk Utility in OS X. Click the DRIVE in the left pane, NOT the partition and select the partition tab.

Also, take a screenshot of Disk Utility so we can better help you.
 
d'evils said:
I could live with it, as the old HD was probably gonna be trashed or never used again, and the enclosure wasn't too expensive. But it's annoying yaknow.
Click to expand...
Trash a 160gb hd? No dice, mail it to me instead.

In all seriousness though, I'd take back the enclosure or try another one. Older enclosures used to have these sorts of problems. Check for a firmware update too.
 
kingjr3 said:
Sounds like you didn't get a full 150GB partition.

Try to repartition it with Disk Utility in OS X. Click the DRIVE in the left pane, NOT the partition and select the partition tab.

Also, take a screenshot of Disk Utility so we can better help you.
Click to expand...

These are screenshots taken after formatting on my PC to FAT32 150gb:







It's weird how on the second pic it says the partition has a capacity of 31.5gb and availability of 149gb.

I have now formatted the drive again to Mac OS Extended (Journal), like you said, selecting 'drive' on the left. But still it only sees 31.5gb.
 
Strange indeed. Your get info window shows the correct capacity.. Do you have 40gb of stuff to you can copy on there? It'd be interesting to see if it lets you use all the available space, or only that seen by Disk Utility.
 
Yeh tried USB. Also updated firmware. I will have a go at transferring 40gb+ to it tomorrow. Thanks for the suggestions :)
 
on the utility that u used to format on ur brothers machine is there a "zero writer." You need to zero write the hd or do a low level format. this will take a couple of hours. then plug it into your mac and the hd will need to be formatted in journal. this will work i promise
 
d'evils said:
I have now formatted the drive again to Mac OS Extended (Journal), like you said, selecting 'drive' on the left. But still it only sees 31.5gb.
Click to expand...

But did you try to repartition? I think the partition table might be a little messed up, so a repartition would probably fix that. I too would suggest zeroing out the drive just to make sure.
 
Trying to repartition wont work. When u format in fat 32 regaurdless of the size of drive only 31.5 gb of the drive is visible. this was the flaw with fat 32 and the reason for moving to NTFS. The windows machines have been patched to fix this issue but macs have not.
 
poetassium said:
Trying to repartition wont work. When u format in fat 32 regaurdless of the size of drive only 31.5 gb of the drive is visible.
Click to expand...

WRONG. There is no such restriction when you format a drive using your Mac - I have a 150 GB FAT32 partition on my external drive. Also, he mentioned using a third party product on the PC side to format it that allowed partitions bigger than the Windows restricted 32GB.
 
kingjr3 said:
WRONG. There is no such restriction when you format a drive using your Mac - I have a 150 GB FAT32 partition on my external drive. Also, he mentioned using a third party product on the PC side to format it that allowed partitions bigger than the Windows restricted 32GB.
Click to expand...

Seconded, (see attachment for partitions of my 600GB LaCie).

Also, see this wiki entry, where it refers to a maximum volume of 4TiB for FAT32. When looking further down, it does state that XP and 200 had issues with larger than 32GB, (which I never experienced I have to say), but Macs quite clearly do not.
 

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kingjr3 said:
But did you try to repartition? I think the partition table might be a little messed up, so a repartition would probably fix that. I too would suggest zeroing out the drive just to make sure.
Click to expand...

Yep repartitioned, and zero filled.

Actually, the drive has to be formatted in DOS using a bootable floppy for even Windows to be able to see the full capacity. After doing that it works fine with Windows.

Think I'll just return the enclosure, it's not worth the hassle.

steve_hill4 said:
my 600GB LaCie
Click to expand...

:cool: How much did that cost?
 
when u formatted the drive with fat32 for what ever reason the software is not function correctly it sounds like in the partition info on the drive it still only wrote 32 and now 150 and then wrote something special to pcs that allows it to see 150 but on the mac this doesnt work. you might try formating in dos mode or from ur windows xp cd.
 
Update

I have now tested 2 other disks in the enclosure, 40gb and 160gb, and they both worked very well. So it's not the enclosure, it's the disk.

poetassium said:
when u formatted the drive with fat32 for what ever reason the software is not function correctly it sounds like in the partition info on the drive it still only wrote 32 and now 150 and then wrote something special to pcs that allows it to see 150 but on the mac this doesnt work. you might try formating in dos mode or from ur windows xp cd.
Click to expand...

Actually thinking back to when I bought the disk a couple years back, I think I had trouble getting my PC to see/format the full capacity. It was used a storage disk in my PC, not the OS disk. I've always had to format it in a DOS program from the manufacturer to get the full capacity.
 
poetassium said:
Trying to repartition wont work. When u format in fat 32 regaurdless of the size of drive only 31.5 gb of the drive is visible. this was the flaw with fat 32 and the reason for moving to NTFS. The windows machines have been patched to fix this issue but macs have not.
Click to expand...

Incorrect. It was not a flaw. It was an intentional software limitation created by Microsoft to artificially encourage users to move to NTFS. There's no such patch for Windows to cope with this. It was broken on purpose.
Edumacation: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463

The maximum disk size is approximately 8 terabytes when you take into account the following variables: The maximum possible number of clusters on a FAT32 volume is 268,435,445, and there is a maximum of 32 KB per cluster, along with the space required for the file allocation table (FAT).
Click to expand...
 
d'evils said:
Actually thinking back to when I bought the disk a couple years back, I think I had trouble getting my PC to see/format the full capacity. It was used a storage disk in my PC, not the OS disk. I've always had to format it in a DOS program from the manufacturer to get the full capacity.
Click to expand...

Who's the manufacturer? Seems weird they would "limit'' the drive to use their own software.
 
kingjr3 said:
Who's the manufacturer? Seems weird they would "limit'' the drive to use their own software.
Click to expand...

Western Digital

I don't think they limited it, they have both Windows and DOS versions of the software. The Windows one didn't see the full capacity and treated it as a smaller disk(can't remember if it was 31.5gb or not). Basically, no program in Windows or OS X can see that this disk is 160gb, only DOS.

Maybe this drive was not right from the start.
 
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