X31 HDD limitation?

[fredstev]

Yesterday, my original 40 Gb Hitachi drive failed suddenly. It had always shown a capacity of 34 Gb. and I just assumed the missing space was the thinkpad R&R partition. At any rate, I replaced it with a 40 Gb. Fujitsu that I had, and ran my Acronis backup. That all went well. After restoring the data, "My Computer" shows C: drive as 34 Gb., same as before. I used Acronis Disk Director, and it showed 3.19 Gb "unallocated", so I attempted to add this space to C: drive. Acronis had a go at it, and reported "cannot change partition size with bad sectors".

There AREN'T any bad sectors, I've checked this drive with several tools, and it's good. Both Acronis and diskmgmt.msc allow me to format the remaining 3.19 Gb. and create another drive (which works fine), I just can't have all 37.19 Gb. as C: drive. Yes, I formatted as NTFS.

My question is, is there some sort of limitation in the bios or something that would cause this? I believe my bios is dated 2005 or thereabouts. I've never run into anything quite like this before with a NTFS drive.

Fred

[sjthinkpader]

No, this is not attributed to HDD size limitation.

Normally I would use the expert cloning mode and adjust the size of hidden partition manually, to slightly larger than 5GB. This is because R&R later updates need a little larger partition size.

[fredstev]

No, this is not attributed to HDD size limitation.

Normally I would use the expert cloning mode and adjust the size of hidden partition manually, to slightly larger than 5GB. This is because R&R later updates need a little larger partition size.

Hmm. That's what I did, however there was no hidden partition on my backup. I depend on Acronis, and not the R&R partition, so I never bothered backing up the hidden partition. I understand why the image was 34 Gb., but this is the first time that I have had a problem assigning unallocated space to the primary active drive. Not a big deal, but I hate mysteries. . . .

Fred

[jtt3011]

I'm pretty sure part of the difference is down to manufacturers/retailers stating capacities in the 'bigger' decimal convention, and software using the binary convention, which will result in something smaller.

ie: Decimal 1k=1000, Binary 1k=1024

I'm also not sure about how the Win MFT allotment is accounted for in software capacity statements. 5 or 6 Gb is quite likely to be grabbed for the MFT (Master File Table) on a 40Gb drive. This is an allocation you can increase, but not decrease, on a Win system.

[ajkula66]

And there are quite a few of us around here who ran 100GB+ drives on X31 machines...so no, there's no limit in BIOS, or at least no one kicked into that wall yet...

[NorrisCell]

And there are quite a few of us around here who ran 100GB+ drives on X31 machines...so no, there's no limit in BIOS, or at least no one kicked into that wall yet...

Agreed. Ran a 250GB drive in both an X31 and X32 without issue

[cmarti]

My X31 has a WD 250GB drive in it right now and no Issues.

But I know that there are also a IDE 400GB available but it's hard to find.

[tomh009]

I have a 7K100 in our X31, and I had a 7K200 in another one before.

The issue you are seeing is with the cloning process (which is somewhat tricky on the X31) rather than hard drive compatibility. If you don't care about the recovery partition, you can use it as is ... otherwise you'll need to re-clone to get the image done right.

[fredstev]

Well, it's working great, and I don't care about the R&R partition, so I'll use it as is. Actually, the small E: drive that I had to create to use the remaining space is handy for backing up and transferring files to a Roboform2go usb stick.

Fred

[marYn]

I've just installed WD 320GB drive into my X31 and it works fine. As far as I know it's the largest PATA drive on market along with WD 250 GB sibling.