Hard disk capacity is a characteristic that is most often the decisive factor for the user when choosing or replacing a disk. So how can you find out the real volume, given that when marking hard drives, gigabytes are equated not to 1024, but 1000 megabytes. And if in the recent past, when the size of the HDD rarely exceeded 80 GB, this could be neglected, then with a disk size of more than a terabyte, the losses are solid figures. You can get information about the real size of your hard drive both from the BIOS and by means of the operating system and various third-party utilities.
Necessary
Windows computer, HDD Life Pro utility, Internet access
Instructions
Step 1
Information about the volume of the hard disk is available in the BIOS, and you can get it even if there is no operating system installed and it is impossible to open the case of the system unit. Power on the computer and press the DEL key (rarely F1, F2, F10). The main BIOS Setup menu will be displayed. Depending on the BIOS version, the name of the option that determines the parameters of the drive differs. Its name can be IDE HDD Auto-Detection, IDE configuration. Select the drive of interest in the list of all installed media and click the Enter key. A window with HDD characteristics will open, where the disk size is indicated. Divide megabytes by 1024 to convert disk size to gigabytes.
Step 2
Using Windows operating system tools, you can obtain disk characteristics from the Computer Management console. Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Manage". In the left window go to the Disk Management snap-in. Launch the Properties command by right-clicking on the graphical representation of the drive labeled "Drive 0", "Drive 1", etc., depending on which drives you have installed. In the Properties dialog box, click the Volumes tab. This will indicate the size of the disk and the size of the volumes on it.
Step 3
You can use third-party utilities to determine disk space. One of these many utilities is HDD Life Pro. It is easy to find it on the Internet. The shareware program is quite enough to determine the size of your hard drive. Download the program, install it on your computer and run it. The window that opens will display detailed information about all the parameters of the disk, including its volume, which will be indicated under the disk name in the upper part of the window.
