Hi,
Finally got an answer from IBM about your hard drive model and its
size discrepancy in relation to what your notebook manufacturer says
and what IBM’s site says. IBM were fairly to the point in their email,
stating: “You may have misunderstood on the DJSA-220 harddisk model
whereby Sony is an OEM customer and the drives that they bought
[would] be a 15gig drive under this model. Generally, we will
differentiate the harddisk by its part number…”
What this generally means is that IBM have a range of hard drives
(sub-models) under the DJSA-220 model, one they sell to the general
public which has a capacity of 20GB and others that they sell to
manufacturers which have a reduced capacity. Sony purchases these
“OEM” drives for use in their notebook range – and they really do have
a capacity of 15GB.
So, unfortunately, your hard disk really does have 15GB capacity. This
can be verified by the BIOS setting you posted which show the capacity
as 15003 Mb and the number of sectors as being almost 1million less
than that of the drive specified on IBM’s site. The BIOS settings will
always give you an accurate report of the hard drive size as they read
the settings directly from the chip on the hard drive. Windows will
not always give you the correct size, as someone commented earlier; it
depends on what the hard drive was portioned into when it was first
set up. From the BIOS report you can be assured that the capacity of
your drive is defiantly 15GB.
All is not lost – Windows XP has an excellent feature which allows
true file compression of individual files in NTFS partitions.
Compression can slow down disk access slightly though so beware which
files you compress. If you wait until you have used Windows for a few
months, you can run “Disk Cleanup” under Programs>Accessories and get
it to compress all files which haven’t been accessed much in the past
few months. This will ensure that commonly accessed files are kept
uncompressed and fast, whilst infrequently used files are compressed
to save space. I generally recover around 400MB on a 3GB hard drive
when compressing the un-accessed files with no noticeable speed loss.
Unfortunately Sony VAIO FX220 notebooks do not have the capacity to
have their hard drives removed and replaced with an updated model.
“The hard drive in the PCG FX220, FX240, FX250 or FX270 notebook is a
non-removable internal component that cannot be upgraded. An external
hard drive or external storage device can be used if more storage
capacity is required.” You can find out more information about this
and adding an external drive to your computer at Sonys support site.
http://ciscweb.sel.sony.com/scripts/web_access.cgi?FUNC=SOLUTION_DETAIL&SOL_ID=1670003388
I hope this answer has been useful. Whilst it wasn’t the best result
you could have hoped for – you do have a definitive answer as to the
capacity of your notebook.
Good luck,
Molloch
Search Strategy:
Used personal contacts to Sony and IBM tech support and hard drive
departments.
sony vaio support
://www.google.com/search?q=sony+vaio+support&hl=en |
