Hitachi 4gb Microdrive

[aasilver]

I recently purchased a Hitachi 4gb Microdrive from an eBay seller at a very good price. When I got it, it had only 2gb of space. After a lot of puzzling I concluded that it had, in the past, been partitioned. Using Windows 'disk manager' I verified that it had been partitioned in half but that only one of the partitions had been activated. I tried all the tricks I knew to erase the partition using disk manager, Partition Magic 8 and multiple digital cameras. No luck. On a hunch I asked an Apple friend to try eraseing on a MAC. It worked and I now have a 4gb Microdrive. Just thought I'd share the experience in case anyone else has the same problem.

[shiningh2o]

aasilver

I just got a hitachi 4gb -- I love it!

Thanks for that bit if of info. It never occurred to me that you could partition a MD. Seems logical now that you have brought that point up.

Out of curiosity how many Gbs of usable space did you end up with?

Mine says 3.8Gb

Just wondering.

[knaar]

Yes, as far as I know only *nix machines can use CF cards like hard drives and (re)partition them. Mac OSX is based on BSD, and is pretty much a unix-like operating system with a super-sweet GUI windowing system put on top. Linux machines can do it to, Solaris, good old Unix, etc, etc. Why on earth no one has made a program for windows that can do it yet is beyond me, seems they'd make a bundle off it!

As for useable space, GB is actually 1024*1024*1024 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes, but a long time ago hard drive and (some) memory manufacturers made a "secret" pact to advertise all their products using billion byte units instead, IE putting 1,000,000,000 bytes per GB on their hard drive and claiming that the drive contains X GB of space, in reality it only contains X billion bytes. Thus, you get your new 120 "GB" hard drive and find it only has 111 GB of space on it. You get your new 4 "GB" MD CF and it only has 3.8 GB on it. But that's life. Anything to make a buck, who cares if it means lying.... ugh.

[aasilver]

Yes mine is 3.8 also. Thanks Knaar. My middle-of-the-night hunch was that it was a MAC user that partitioned the MD. It works great. I use it for full-length movies and Mp3 CD music. A one CF entertainment center. 16 movies and 6 CD's.