Why can I only see 128GB of 185GB HD?

spookyspooky
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hi,



My friend recently bought a belkin USB external hard drive caddy and a 185GB IBM deskstar HD to put in it. he asked me to set the thing up so I took it home and installed the hd into the enclosure. This is where the problems start.

No matter what i do, the drive only shows up as 128GB. Disk Utility only allows me to partition a single partition of 128GB maximum size. Its as if no mac can see the other 50GB or so. I know that some macs have an internal limit of 120GB but this is an external drive. I have tried this on a dual 450 G4, an ibook 800, a new pentium, a powerbook G4 17" all with the same result.



does anyone have any ideas as to how I can see the full 185GB?



thanx



spooky

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 5
    dobbydobby Posts: 797member
    You normally only have this problem if you plug a 137GB+ HD into an ata66 (or less) controller. The dual 450 would have this problem but certainly not the new pentium as ultra ata100 lets you see 137GBplus HD's.

    My friend has a 17" PB with a 400GB USB2 Drive so it should work. Could it be a USB 1 thing?



    Dobby.
  • Reply 2 of 5
    gene cleangene clean Posts: 3,481member
    Connect it to a PC, use Partition Magic to create 2 partitions, one with 127GB the other with the rest, and then plug it in back into your Mac.



    It should work fine but you'll have 2 partitions.
  • Reply 3 of 5
    mr. hmr. h Posts: 4,870member
    Just to expand a bit on what Dobby said:



    It sounds like the external enclosure has an ATA interface that cannot "see" beyond 128 GB. Have you tried taking the drive out of the enclosure and putting it into a modern Mac or PC desktop? Such computers should be able to see the whole drive and this will confirm that it is a short-coming of the external case.



    You could also google the case model number...
  • Reply 4 of 5
    spookyspooky Posts: 504member
    Hi Guys,



    thanx for the replies. The case is made by belkin and they confirm that the case is capable of holding a hard disk drive up to 250GB. I can't understand this at all. I have tried to run norton on the disk to check for errors and it finds none. I could understand it if I had tried to put this inside my dual 450 but I haven't. its in an external case.



    does anyone have any more ideas/suggestions?



    thanx in advance
  • Reply 5 of 5
    dobbydobby Posts: 797member
    Do you know anyone with a newer mac either a QuickSilver (or newer) or newish Powerbook?



    It would be interesting to see what the newer machines do.



    Dobby.
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