Thinkpads Forum

I just got a used Thinkpad and I'm puzzled by the size of the drive in it.

The drive is a 20GB Hitachi Travelstar, model IC25N020ATMR04-0

In Windows, the drive shows up as a 15.5 or so GB drive with a single partition on it.

That's awfully small, I thought, so I booted with the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test utility. The DFT identifies the drive with the same model number and serial number as on the drive labels/stickers, and gives the size of the drive as 16.75GB

Acronis Disc Director says the drive is 15.6GB with a single partition.

FDISK says the drive is 15967 bytes with a single partition.

I imaged the drive and then did a low level format and partition with FDISK, and ended up with the same size.

Now, I'm used to drives showing up as smaller than the stated size, but that's usually on the order of about 93% of the stated size. On a 20GB drive, I'd expect to have about 18.6GB of usable space.

Anyone know what's going on here?

Did you look for hidden partitions on this drive?

Well, I figured there had to be a hidden partition on the drive (it's the obviousl explanation) , but I would have thought that the Hitachi drive utility would return the actual size of the physical drive and not be misled by any partitioning of the drive.

Also, I used FDISK to erase all the partitions it saw (only one) and create a new primary DOS partition, which is still only 15+GB.

So if there is a hidden partition there, I don't know how to detect it, or remove it. Any ideas?

Using the Hitachi feature tool you can restore the drive to its full size or you can unhide the partition and delete it that way. Ranish partition manager will do the trick also.
I would recommend that you make a set of recovery cd's before removing the restore partition.

Carbon Unit, I don't see an option to do that with the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test (all I see is an option to erase the drive). Is there another Hitachi utility?

I downloaded Ranish partition manager, created the boot disk, and all it shows is one 7+GB partition, go figure...

I wondered if this could be a bios issue, so I popped the drive into my personal T23 that usually runs a 60GB drive, and it still shows as 15.6 GB, so it guess it's not a bios issue.

I also tried Partition Magic (I have been running all the partition managers I've tried from boot disks), and it shows the drive as 15.6 GB also.

Still stumped. If there is some kind of hidden partition, how the %^&% do I find it and delete it?

I can't imagine this hidden partition being completely unavailable to fdisk in pure dos. It usually shows the partition as an unknown format when listing all partitions. Is it at all possible that that is the actual size of the drive? It's hapened to me where a drive I bought is missing more GB than I expect...but it's the manufacturer's fault.

Nolonemo, Sorry I didn't get back to you.
Use the Hitachi Feature Tool to restore the size.
Hit F2 and use the right and left arrow keys to see the different screens on the UBCD.
The partition is hidden from fdisk in DOS.