75GXP / HP Strangeness...

[ajf3]

Hi all,

I just bought a 45GB 75GXP off of a guy... or so I thought... This drive is a HP OEM drive and I having a problem with the capacity. Here's whats going on:

- Drive has a HP label which identifies it as a DLTA-307045 (45GB 75gxp), but the label also lists the capacity as 40.0GB.
- My bios (Asus K7V) sees it as an IBM-DLTA-307045 with a capacity of 40037MB.
- Filemanager lists it as 37.2GB

I talked to an IBM tech guy who said that the DLTA-307045 is the 75gxp with a capacity of like 46.1GB. The serial# and part# show up in his system as a 45GB drive.

I can't seem to talk to anyone at HP without paying a $25 tech support fee...

Any ideas as to what the deal may be? I doubt that HP could've done anything to the drive to drop it from 45 to 40... If IBM made a "special" version of the 45/75gxp for HP OEM, it seems like they would have given it a unique model number... Basically, I'm concerned that if the capacity is different than the stock 307045, what else is different - ie, am I getting the quality/performance of the real 75gxp?

Thanks!

 

[Eli]

Maybe the person that partitioned it only allocated 40gb. Try and re-fdisk.

 

[ajf3]

Nope... I was the one that fdisk'd it. It was brand-new in a bag, no part or formatting had been done. When I fdisk'd it I answered yes to "use all avail space, etc"... and it went ahead and did 40G.

 

[ajf3]

Just another thought... could the bios in my K7V have some sort of 40GB limitation so that it can't see the remaining 5GB?

 

[ajf3]

Well, I got the drives installed, and its still looking weird... look at the results sandra gave me:

Disk #1 75gxp ~15GB
Disk #2 75gxp ~40GB ? (sb 45)

D1 D2
Drive Index 16435 15711
Buff Read 54 57
Buff Write 37 44
Seq Write 26 22
Access 8ms 11ms (??? - why so high?)
Space 14.2GB 37.3GB (??? - not even the 40GB)

Blah!

 

[ColdTech]

Ajf3 calling HP & paying the 25 bucks would just waste your money anyway. They Would not know. My Sudgestion would be to run a full surface scan & see if there are bad sectors on it that are getting overlooked when FDisking. You might also want to try manually imputing the info for the HD into the bios (oh my god can you still do that)

 

[RossGr]

Why not try partitioning into 2 smaller drives a 20 and all the rest, see what happens. If it is your mobo then you should get the whole drive.

 

[ajf3]

I did run a surface test & there are no bad sectors... I'll try the two partitions and manual entry & get back to ya...

Thanks!

 

[ajf3]

Hi guys,

I tried the 2 partition thing... no luck there.

I also tried manually entering the Cyl/Head/Sec values, but I couldn't get it to go above 40083.

One interesting thing I noticed was that no matter what values I entered for CHS (I tried some big ones), I couldn't get the read-only field "Maximum LBA Capacity" to go above 40083... any ideas there?

I'm using an Asus K7V with the 1.0.0.5 bios, I believe.

Thanks for all the help!

 

[ajf3]

Hi guys,

Here's another quick update... I scanned in pics of the label and the exposed circuits on the back of the drive. If someone else has one of these to compare them to, I'd appreciate it!

Also, the 45GB gxp does have 3 15GB platters, right? If so, then there must be 45GB physically in this drive but HP somehow disabled or reserved 5Gb of it???

Crap... my webhost won't let me link like that... lemme fund somewhere to post the pics.

 

[ajf3]

Ok... lets try this again!

DLTA-307045 75gxp HP label on Front

View of exposed circuits/chips

Later!

 

[DaddyG]

Its possible that you have reached the limit of the number of cylinders that your BIOS can address. 28 bits are used to address the cylinder, head and sector. Some drives have too many cylinders to be addressed by the bios and are set to Limited Cylinder Mode. (Some drives actually have a jumper to control this). I would guess that this is the limit that you have run into. Maybe ASUS has a BIOS update.

 

[ajf3]

I'm trying to find out about the K7V and drive sizes... I did check into the bios updates - .6 and .7 are both available, but neither mentions anything about drive size limitations.

Going back to the other thing (assuming it's not my bios) - what could HP have done to make a 3 - 15G platter drive show up as 40G v. 45G???