Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[oldfogy]

Glad to hear you are now proceeding, I suppose we forget sometimes that there is more than just Windows.
160 GB should not take too long to format "providing the segments that your OS marked as being bad are repairable"

Good luck

[silversurfer44]

This is one weird drive! Cleared it with the SeagateTools, past all tests and came up as 160+gigs.
Put my Linux OS back in the same machine to format the drive. It came up with 149gig.
Formatted it, put it back in the enclosure to use as backup for my main PC, it says it is a 139gig.
Checked it with gparted, it complains that I can't have a partition outside the disk.
Checked it with df on the cli it reports it as a 126gig.

I know where it is going, with the other scrap that I have. But if you can figure it out oldfogy I will be oblidged. If you can't or anybody else for that matter then don't worry I may find out some day. I have googled the problem and it would seem that no-one else has come across this.

[roseway]

Some of those differences may just be due to different types of gigabyte. The Seagate tools will certainly be reporting a gigabyte as 1000x1000x1000 bytes, but the Linux tool may report it as 1024x1024x1024 bytes, and thus reports a smaller number.

But the other effects suggest to me that the disk has errors which would make it untrustworthy.

[silversurfer44]

At the risk of oldfogy saying 'I told you so'  The drive is going in the bin.
Thanks Roseway I understand what you say, but some of the differences just don't seem to add up. Googling the gparted complaint did bring up quite a few possibilities but no concrete answers.
I would never have trusted the drive to be safe, but it seems to get worse the more I try. So bin here it comes.

[roseway]

A sensible decision in my view.

[oldfogy]

I wouldn't say a thing like that, but what I would say is, possibly if you have a month or so to spare then it would keep you out of trouble trying to solve the enigma of the lost Gigabytes

Windows does create a very small totally hidden partition of about 8MB (MB not GB) so that may be the partition that it is reporting, but that is only a guess.

[roseway]

Just as a little postscript to this, I bought the USB drive which I referred to near the start of this thread, and I must say that it's excellent. It's fast, capacious and virtually silent. Fast enough that I'll be happy to back up several gigabytes of photos every day without having to twiddle my thumbs while it's working. And it can be left switched on all the time because it consumes next to no power, and the disk only spins up when the USB connector is plugged in.

[silversurfer44]

Thank you for that Roseway, I have just had a look. Comparing prices though I can get the same product at PC World ( a place I rarely visit ) £69.99. Now that is more expensive than advertise at Pixmania, until adds the cost of carriage, it is not that much dearer then. Does one have to pay import duty on this item? If so then for once PCWorld could work out almost the same price.

[roseway]

Actually I bought mine in PC World too.   I don't think there's anything dodgy about the Pixmania one, but it's obviously a grey import, so I suppose there could be guarantee complications, and the power supply probably isn't a manufacturer's original. As you say, by the time you add delivery (£7) there's little difference in price anyway.