weird harddrives

[gfidsens]

i have two hard drives: a 40gb ibm 7200rpm and a Samsung 20gb 5400. use the ibm as the master. windows is reporting I'm using 29 gbs of it, but didn't sound right. got out the old calculator and saw that, according to explorer, was only using 22gb.
where is the other 7gb? did a similar analysis of the Samsung drive, it checked out? I'm running win XP pro, where is the scandisk utility, or something like it? Am I imagining things, or is something hidden eating up 7 of my GB?
thx

[gfidsens]

found and ran scandisk on the ibm, no problems.
would the fact that the samsung 20gb is partitioned in FAT32 and the IBM 40 gb in NTSC make any diff?

[Tribble]

Windows never reports the correct size of your hdd's anyway.

EG: I have a 20gig and an 80 gig and they are displayed as 18.6gig and 74.5gig, I dont know why, but it is normal.

[TwoRails]

It's kinda like mixing oil and water. Giga is metric, byte is binary. MS (if I remember right) was the first to metric "giga" with bytes, when there is actually a binary equiviant term for "giga" (but can't remember it off hand).

So, if you use "giga" in metric terms, your HD is correct. If you use it as gigabytes, then the calculated number is higher, making it seem your HD is smaller than it should be.

There are a lot of good threads on the subject if you search for them. Here is a recent related thread:

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=75386

I lost the link I had to a scientific site that got into the nitty-gritty of it all... maybe someone can post it if they have it...

HTH

TwoRails

[andyms18a]

explorer dont show the hiden files and folders and system restor folder