On Tue, 11 Dec 2012, Michael Moore wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 11:29 AM, gregrwm <tclug1 at whitleymott.net> wrote:
>
>> the Maxtor_6L120P0 is purportedly a 120gb disc, indeed the one i have 
>> here says so on its label, however fdisc claims it only has 33.8 GB. 
>> fdisk seems to have a command to change the number of cylinders, i 
>> tried that, whereupon fdisk shows the given new number of cylinders, 
>> but still shows the total number of sectors as unchanged, and won't 
>> create a partition that goes beyond the original number of sectors, so 
>> what's the point of the fdisk cylinders command, it's not at all clear 
>> to me.  do i really have a 120gb disc here?  if so, how do i start 
>> using all 120gb?  any clues/ideas?
>
> Are your jumpers on the right pins? Don't some disks have jumpers to 
> limit the size they report so that old BIOSes can handle them?
>
> Also, google found something familiar
> http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=1534455 (searched for
> "33.8 gigs")


Interesting -- there's a 32GB switch?  So, 32 GiB is...

$ echo "2^35" | octave -qfH
ans =  3.4360e+10

34.36 GB, which is a little more than what you see, probably because of 
some kind of overhead.  That's probably it -- jumpers on wrong pins.

Mike