First off I have a Hard Drive Dock for use with internal drives to make them usable as external drives via USB. This hard drive is from my PC which I no longer have. I am trying to use Disk Utility on my Mac With OS X Leopard, following several guides put out on the internet of how to erase it. But now that I've tried erasing it, it is still not completely back to 1TB (it's at 931.5 GB) and still has some sort of image still on it but is recognized as empty, which seems odd. It did have Windows XP on it but I thought that erasing it would have gotten rid of it in Disk Utility, but maybe it didn't and that is why it has around 70 Gigs missing? Also it is only viewable in Disk Utility and not on the Desktop. So I am wondering if that is relevant. So I guess my major question is if this is all part of the process of switching it from being Windows based to Mac based, or am I making some big mistakes? I no longer have a PC and want to use this drive exclusively as back up for my mac. Please let me know if there is any other information I should supply you with. Thanks.
Try running active@killdisk (freeware.. and useful) on it.. on the root partition, then repartitioning and formatting. That's what I do with drives which constantly report wrong size.
Whenever you format a hard drive a certain amount of space is lost, A 1TB drive isn't really a 1 TB drive, 931GB seems reasonable. I Have 2 1.5TB drives and both when formated only have 1.36 TB of free space.
you dont really lose disc space every time you format it's just has less than it truely says like a 2gb flashdrive has something like 1.76gb but since its so close to 2gb they just say 2 rather than 1.76gb another example is my HD for my laptop is a 500gb but when i install it in my laptop the acctual ammount of storage space available is 465
According to what I've heard, it may well be the fact that it is converting the shown size from using (1024 bytes/kb) to (1000 bytes/kb) I don't know, just a thought.
