Hard drive capacity incorrect

Fellow hoarders of old Macs and their various components, please advise. I have very reluctantly, tears flowing , partially dismantled my old G3 350 b/w with its dual drives in preparation for recycling.

I'm in the process of reformatting one of the drives, an 80 Gb Seagate with Panther on it, to MacOS Extended for storage purposes only. Initially the Seagate wouldn't mount to my eMac, then I noticed it had no jumpers. Remedied that, with a jumper from the rear of a Zip drive, imitating the configuration of two other spare ATA drives that do mount successfully, ie. pin sets 1 and 4. The Seagate drive then mounted.

After erasing the Seagate, Disk Utility stated its capacity as 31.5 Gb. I then zeroed all free space on the drive, but still just the 31.5 reading.

What might I be doing wrong? Are the jumpers on the wrong pins (for the Seagate) perhaps, and is the OS reading the disk as partitioned?

Update: tried partitioning the Seagate using 1 partition. No joy, capacity still as shown in the attachment.

Did you use Disk Utility to zero out the free space on the drive? If you did, Disk Utility not only zeros it out but also removes the space from the mix.

Not sure how to recover the zeroed out space, but try erasing the drive once more and apply a format to it.

chscag said:

Did you use Disk Utility to zero out the free space ... try erasing the drive once more and apply a format to it.

Click to expand...

Yes, I used DU and then tried erasing again.

But that was not the problem. It was the jumpers, incorrectly set. In fact, there should have been just the one jumper. Sometimes it pays to read the instructions

Thanks very much for your help ...... Hugh

You don't have pins 1&2 jumpered (Closest to power connector) do you? If so, try jumpering pins 7&8

JohnCL said:

You don't have pins 1&2 jumpered (Closest to power connector) do you?

Click to expand...

I did, and had both 1-2 and 7-8 jumpered. I learned from reading the label that doing so limited the readable capacity to 32 Gb!!

If so, try jumpering pins 7&8

Click to expand...

The one jumper is now vertical on pins 7-8, and everything is working a-i-s.

In my own defence, the Seagate label is reversed in its placement when looking at the jumper pins, and I shall blame that for the snafu.

Thanks ..... Hugh

Hugh,

Do I understand correctly that after reformatting this drive...it's only reporting 31.5gig for an 80gig drive?

If so, this certainly smells of a 2nd partition somewhere that needs to be eliminated.

- Nick

No Nick, see Post #6. The drive is definitely back to 80 Gb, formatted and ready to go. Thanks ..... Hugh