Available Hard Drive Space

[kent_butler]

I just completed my first build. Everything went rather smooth and it is on and running. I purchased a new WD 36.7 SATA hard drive. I am running Windows XP Professional. When I am looking at the details it shows that total size of the hard drive is 34.4 (not the 36.7 as listed). The more troubling problem is that it shows the free space as 30.8 after only loading the OS. The OS is only about 1.5GB not the approx. 3.5 that it says that it is. Does anybody have any ideas as to what is causing this and how to fix it??

Thanks for your Help in advance,
Kent

[TheJackal]

The actual capacity of a hard drive is always smaller then it says it is on the box, so that is normal.

How much space does it say is being used? Do you have any extra data or programs on the drive that could account for the extra 2gb that you say shouldn't be taken up?

[kent_butler]

No, nothing else has been loaded on there. I noticed on the first boot up--when I went into My Computer. I was hoping to resove this before I did load anything on there, just in case I had to reformat or something.

[TheJackal]

In "My Computer" When you look at the properties sheet for your drive, how much space does it say is being used?

[kent_butler]

It says Used space is 3.57 GB

[TheJackal]

What Operating system? I'm assuming Windows XP?

I would just ignore it, on my machine, a fresh install of XP Home with SP1, and all of the drivers takes up around 3-3.5gigs.

You still have over 30gigs of space left on your drive.

[kent_butler]

Thanks for your help. I didn't know if maybe this would cause a problem down the road. And I should would hate to have to reload everything all over again.

Again thanks for your help,

Kent

[TheJackal]

Remember that the 1.5gb that the minimum system requirements would state, would be for a bare minimum installation... This wouldn't count any extra OS components, service packs, swap files, or deletable installation files.

[glc]

The pagefile and system restore eats as much space as the rest of the OS.