Partitioning a big hard drive... for Mac

imuneekru · Post by **imuneekru** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 4:55 pm

I just got a 250GB hard drive for my videos, and it's only showing up as 233 gigs. To make a long story short, I've gotten as far as figuring out that I need to partition it in order for all 250GB to show up as usable space.

How do I go about doing that???

Problem is, I'm running a Mac, and all the threads on this topic sound like Microsoft Greek to me. Is there a savvy Mac user out there who can help me?

Here are my specs:
I'm running Mac OSX 10.3 (Panther).
Hard drive is Fantom Drives USB 2.0 250GB 7200rpm, 8MB cache. I think that's all...???

Pwolf · Post by **Pwolf** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 5:30 pm

If the box says 250GB, it's wrong. It's a big marking ploy... if you take 250,000,000,000 bytes (of course not the actual number) and convert it to gigabytes, you'll get roughly 233GB.

Pwolf

imuneekru · Post by **imuneekru** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 5:59 pm

You're kidding. Phooey. Well, at least my faith in my lovely Mac is restored. Oh well, a few gigabytes never killed my spirit. Btw, FAT32 is of the devil. Whoever formatted this thing was a moron. I've got her up and running now.

Thanks for the tip.

Pwolf · Post by **Pwolf** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 6:01 pm

imuneekru wrote:You're kidding. Phooey. Well, at least my faith in my lovely Mac is restored. Oh well, a few gigabytes never killed my spirit. Btw, FAT32 is of the devil. Whoever formatted this thing was a moron. I've got her up and running now. Thanks for the tip.

lol, well i assume they formated it so it would be compatible on all platforms.

Pwolf

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Mon Apr 03, 2006 3:57 am

imuneekru wrote:You're kidding. Phooey. Well, at least my faith in my lovely Mac is restored. Oh well, a few gigabytes never killed my spirit. Btw, FAT32 is of the devil. Whoever formatted this thing was a moron. I've got her up and running now. Thanks for the tip.

FAT32 is from Microsoft, so...

Also, 250GB on the box is not wrong, if you count the way HDD manufacturers count a gigabyte (1 billion bytes (1,000,000,000 bytes)) and not how software companies count a gigabyte (1,024 megabytes (2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes)). Misleading, perhaps. Some companies do put a disclaimer or their definition of a gigabyte on the box, some don't. Marketing at work, you gotta love it.

Shazzy · Post by **Shazzy** » Sat Jun 17, 2006 6:06 pm

Directory info also takes up a bit of space