[Novalug] Clonezilla: when is a 40G drive not a 40G drive?

Jon LaBadie novalugml@jgcomp.com
Sun Apr 24 10:12:04 EDT 2011


On Sun, Apr 24, 2011 at 09:15:24AM -0400, Ed James wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Nick Danger <nick@hackermonkey.com> wrote:
> > Answer : when it comes from WD.
> >
> > (I know, Im full of questions today!)
> >
> > I have a image I made with Clonezilla. Its a WinXP image from a 40G
> > Hitachi IDE drive. Works great when I say I'm restoring it to another
> > 40G Hitachi. Also works great if I go bigger, like to an 80G. The
> > problem is I have piles of WD and Seagate HD drives in the machines and
> > every time it tells me the destination isn't big enough...Apparently the
> > WD and Segates are only 38.something G where the Hitachi was 40.something.
> >
> > But before I went though that effort, I thought I'd ask on here, anyone
> > run into something similar? Am I just missing an option in Clonezilla?
> >
> Nick,
> 
>    However, this doesn't explain why it's not 40GB.  From what research I did, I
> wonder if the drive has some hidden partition used for diagnostics or
> wotnot that just isn't visible.
> 

No hidden partition.  Just marketing likes to report the larger decimal
numbers rather than the smaller binary numbers.

For clarification from Seagate propagandists see this article:

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=194563&NewLang=en

It includes this paragraph.  Pay particular note to the last sentence :)

    "Often when two or more people begin discussing storage capacity,
     some will refer to binary values and others will refer to decimal
     values without making distinction between the two. This has
     caused much confusion in the past. In an effort to dispatch this
     confusion, all major disk drive manufactures use decimal values
     when discussing storage capacity."

I guess Hitachi is not a "major disk drive manufacturer". ;)

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  novalugml@jgcomp.com
 JG Computing
 12027 Creekbend Drive		(703) 787-0884
 Reston, VA  20194		(703) 787-0922 (fax)



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