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From: Travis Poppe <tlp@liquidx.org>
To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
Date: Thu, 29 Dec 2005 12:02:51 -0700
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Subject: Harddrive size being reported incorrectly?
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Hello, 

I've recently purchased an IDE 320GB Western Digital WD3200JB-22KFA0 
harddrive for use in my FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE fileserver. The BIOS in the system 
reports the drive as being a 320GB, but FreeBSD (dmesg) sees it as a 305245MB 
(or 298GB drive) in two separate machines. When it has finally been formatted 
for use, I get 289GB of available space.

Now, I understand that harddrive manufacturers measure things differently 
(1000kbytes per gbyte rather than 1024, or something like that) than 
expected, but I've been told by a few people that I should be getting around 
305-312GB of available space after the drive has been formatted. 

sysinstall had to adjust the drive geometry because the reported one was 
'invalid'. I tried to manually specify the geometry BIOS reported, but this 
too was rejected as invalid. 

BIOS Geometry-CYL/HD/SECT: 65535/16/255 

Am I really getting the full potential out of this drive, or is something 
wrong? 

Thanks,
-- 
Travis Poppe
IRC: tlp @ irc.freenode.net