[rescue] Only 30gb of 80gb showing up?

[nate at portents.com]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:54:56 -0500, William Barnett-Lewis
<wlewisiii at gmail.com> wrote:
> In the continuing saga of my attempts at reviving my Macbook I picked
> up the firewire case and put an old 80gb deathstar in it. It was last
> used in a Ultra 5 that never would run right due to memory errors. Now
> only 30gb of the 80gb is showing up in 10.5.6 drive utilities. Enough
> to get the machine running and hopefully recover some files from the
> old disk, but I am curious as to why this is the case. Is there
> something in the partition map from the attempted NetBSD/Solaris
> installs that MacOS isn't liking? Something wrong with the drive?

Take a close look at the drive jumpers.  It was not at all uncommon for
ATA drives of that era to have a 32GB limit jumper for compatibility with
crappy BIOSes.

- Nate