2G or not 2G (But that was not even the question!)

On Friday night we went to the Bass's for Dinner.

Greg had bought a PC in 2000 and was just now running out of the space on his hard drive. A friend of his, gave him an old 6 Gigabyte hard drive that he had - on the basis that he would not be expected to help him install it.

I was there on Friday night, and Denzil suggested that I perhaps try add the hardware.

I decided to give it a go. We unscrewed the case. Upon unscrewing the case I discovered that there was not spare adapter plug to plug the hard drive in with. With most hard drive wires you get two adaptors - one for the primary hard drive and one for the slave of the hard drive. So, I had expected to find a free slave plug. But the CD-ROM was using that adaptor plug.

hmmmm. I thought. Lets just for now, see if I can get the computer to see the new hard drive. I unplugged the CD-ROM; and plugged the new hard drive in. Upon restarting, I then had a lot of trouble because the computer could not find any hard drives. I then plugged everything back in the way it was; and still it would not start.

This was strange.

Eventually, I discovered it was because the plug had not been pushed firmly enough in.

But then, when I went into the CMOS to discover the available hard drives - Denzil and I noticed a very strange thing.

The current hard drive. The 2 Gigabyte Hard drive Greg had bought 5 years ago, was being discoverd as a 6 Gigabyte Hard drive.

I asked Greg about this.

He said, "No. I definitely bought the 2 Gigabyte hard drive. The 6 gigabyte option at the time was expensive and I thought not worth the money. Anyway, the specs should be written clearly on the in-side cover of the box."

I looked on the inside cover of the box...

It read 4 Gigabytes.

So Greg paid for a 2 Gigabyte hard drive. And he had just run out of disk space - and needed more quite urgently.

The label on the inside of the box said 4 Gigabytes.

The CMOS initialisation was telling me that the hard drive actually had 6 gigabytes.

So I then went into windows and looked at his C: drive.
I saw that it had 2 Gigabytes of space and was very nearly full.

I then went into the command line and ran the FDISK utility.

It told me quite clearly that there was 6 Gigabyte hard drive it was aware of.
It also told me it had only created 2 Gigabyte C Drive primary parition and that it was only using 33% of its hard drive capacity.

So I created an extended partition of the rest of the hard drive. I then created a logical D Drive of 4 Gigabytes on that partition.

I then formatted the D: Drive.

And... hey presto...

Suddenly there was now a 4 Gigabyte empty D: Drive ready for use by Greg and others.

Greg's problem had been solved.

There was still a spare hard drive lying on the side of the table.

I told Greg, that the next time I come by, I will try and remember to bring a another plug to plug that 6 Gigabyte hard drive in... and then he would have a total of 12 Gigabytes free.

Greg was not fussed as the actual problem had been solved.

It seemed that when the computer vendor was told that Greg wanted to buy the cheaper 2 Gigabyte hard drive; he gave him the more expensive 6 Gigabyte hard drive - and only made the OS aware of 2 Gigabyte of it.

Quite bizarre.

But not as bizarre as my mother's question at the dinner table that evening...

She asked "What is the name of lake in which people see the Loch Ness monster?"

Anyways....

Later.