A knackered hard drive, and a knackered hard drive!

Question

Hi all, I have a slight hard drive problem. I know this is not directly linked to this iBook forum, but this happens to be my favourite place to be with all you friendly people, hope you can help me out.
I have a Western Digital 40GB Hard drive, crap, I know... who uses 40GB these days eh? It was in my WinXP PC, and I needed that because my internal HD in my iBook G4 is half corrupted (needed partitioning before I could install 10.3.9).My good friend and I spent half the night trying to get the full 30GB on my internal Mac hard drive, but it was having none of it. Partitioning was my only option. I'm stuck with 14.04GB, and that is all I can squeeze out of it.
Anyway, back to the point, my Western Digital 40GB HD needed an enclosure which I bought from eBay. This particular enclosure I bought, was broken on delivery (the yellow power cable supplying the hard drive had broken off the circuit board, it wasn't until I phoned up my buddy and yelled for help. I fixed this wire issue and now the enclosure is working.) But... my 40GB hard drive isn't a 40GB hard drive... yeah work that one out. For a long time my Windows XP machine has been reporting that it's only got 23GB to play with. I thought this was normal until I actually LOOKED at the hard drive. The mac is saying the same... 23GB to play with. My friend and I decided to experiment a little with this, by putting the hard drive in his Linux PC, only to find that the hard drive is reporting the full 40GB. Strange, and we were BOTH baffled.
He decided to try putting something on the hard drive after we formatted it as HFS+ (Journaled). Still showing 23GB on the Mac, he put a film on the hard drive taking up 4.3GB. The film worked and played without a problem. Then after a discussion, we experimented again by putting the HD back in the Linux computer, and it said that my Hard Drive had 40GB of free space. What, even after the film was put on... should be saying 36GB. I failed my GCSE Maths, but come on, my unborn son could have figured that out. 40GB - 4GB used by a film = 36GB?????? Apparently NOT! Both of us looked at each other with the facial expression of... 'What the......!'
So if anyone has ANY suggestions to this... "thing", It would be appreciated. I would love a full 40GB on the enclosure, I know the internal 30GB Hard Drive is knacked, but can a hard drive really report the wrong info like that? This is the strangest thing I have ever come across in 9 years of computing.
Hope you are ALL well, and didn't eat too many Easter Eggs... my 2 were gone within, ooh 48 hours. Heh heh!!
Kieran
iBook G4, 1.07GHz, 256MB RAM, CD-RW Drive, HD enclosure Western Digital 40GB   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   Windows XP Home SP1, networked with iBook G4

Answer 1

The question becomes, after erasing, select the partition selection of Disk Utility, is what does it tell you about how many partitions are there? Under Volume Scheme there should be no separators, and it should be clear to the very bottom. If it isn't you have more than one partition, and should try to call it just one partition. Be sure you are selecting the icon naming the kind of drive it is, and not the one naming the name of the drive as it appears on the desktop on the far left after selecting the Partition section of Disk Utility. Change current to 1 partition if necessary.