The issue of harddrives being smaller than advertised is due to a common unit confusion, employed as trick by manufacturers in order to fool the customer.
The manufacturers like to quote the size as Gigabyte, which is \"one-thousand millions of bytes\", which is the scientificly
correct factor. However, the
commonly used factor for \"Gigabytes\" is
1024*1024*1024 bytes.
Therefore, a harddisk that has 80 Gigabyte in fact only has 74,5 Gigabytes, which is
quite a difference.
Almost every harddisk tool uses the commonly used factor, which is why you\'ll see the difference after installing the harddrive.
Therefore, the manufacturers are
scientificly correct, but are abusing the fact that the commonly used factor is different, so they may be considered
morally wrong (as increasingly usual).
@ Efflixi: 800 rpm might be a bit slow, though.
Edit: @ Harkin: DON\'T!
If you change the partition size, the file system will
not change. Therefore, you will not gain any space by it. It might not damage anything, but I\'m not exactly sure.
Having said that, I advise you to try to either get two more floppies or use a second computer as replacement.
You can easily back-up the contents of a floppy using the dd command of Linux. Therefore, use some driver disks or whatever that don\'t contain any copy protection crap, and back them up to files on the harddisk. Now you have three floppies, can partition, and then restore the floppy image to them afterwards.
OR you can go with that single floppy, by having the images on the second computer, and overwriting the disk according to what is required at which stage. It\'ll take more time, but you can do this. I have done this once while installing Linux.
However, it will fail if the program changes anything on the floppy. In this case, you need to dump the image from the disk after each insertion in the other computer, so that you can put it back in the form it is expected. This should not be necessary, but just to be sure, you know it. You can check if this is necessary by write-protecting the disk (to see if the program complains), or simply do it \"just in case\".
