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In CMOS, FDISK, Windows File Manager and Windows Explorer, my IDE disk reports smaller capacity than the number of bytes reported by CHKDISK. Why?

April 26, 2017CMOS disk Explorer Fdisk file IDE manager reports smaller Windows

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In CMOS, FDISK, Windows File Manager and Windows Explorer, my IDE disk reports smaller capacity than the number of bytes reported by CHKDISK. Why?

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Because there are two different definitions of a megabyte and a gigabyte. Hard disk drive capacity is calculated by taking the number of Cylinders x Heads x Sectors x 512 bytes per sector. Hard disk drive manufacturers define a megabyte as equaling 1,000,000 bytes and CHKDSK calculates based on this value as well. However, your system’s CMOS, FDISK, Windows File Manager and Windows Explorer calculate disk capacity based on a megabyte equaling 1,048,576 bytes. Therefore different utilities might report different capacities for the same drive.