Win XP doesn't detect my total HDD capacity

[JTH]

I have a new 80gig. 7200rpm Western Digital drive and have recently put it together with Win XP to form my system. Although in BIOS it is listed as an 80 gigabyte drive, when I go into "My Computer", Windows detects only 74 gigabytes.

Now I know some of you might say that it's still 74 gigabytes that you'll probably never fill, but where I grew up we learned to respect that 6 gigabytes a whole lot!

The same thing happens with my other computer. I have a 20gig. Western Digital drive on Win ME and only 18.6 gigabytes are detected. This is a problem right now as I have filled it and the extra 1.4gigs. would make a mountain of a difference...

Hope you can help,

JTH

[Force Flow]

Don't worry. That's normal. It has to do with the cluster size on the disk when you format it. I'm assuming that it's been formatted FAT32, correct? If it has, you may want to consider NTFS as less disk space is lost.

[Nuclear Krusader]

Not really.

Quoting RJ from another post:

What really happens is that hard drive manufacturers "lie".

Kilo, Mega, Giga etc. are normally a factor of 1000. In the computer system it is 1024.

But the hard drive manufacturers use 1000, but Windows reports the correct size using 1024 as the factor.

[Force Flow]

Jeez... that's my third bad call today! I think I'm out now.

What I said applies to data management, not your question, sorry JTH.

[Davidoo1]

Krusader's quote is accurate.

My Gateway advertised 40GB hard drive is reported by Windows XP as 37.2GB. Windows is correct.

[Jeradln82]

Kinda like motorcycle engines, A bike label as 250cc does not really have 250cc Its like 249 or some shizzle.

Marketing..pfft

[kingsucka]

I heard that XP has a "hidden partition" where a copy of the O/S is stored for Recovery reasons and that is why the capacities don't match. Is there any truth to that? My HDD is 40gig but only 37gigs show.

It seems that about 3 gigs per 40 are lost in this marketing "method" of capacity.

Thanks for setting me straight on this.

I agree w/ JTH 6gigs ain' nuthin' (till you need it).

[HAL9000]

It's not a hidden partition, they're hidden files. The difference is all in the calculation as stated above.... I have a WD 120Gb and it shows as something like 110Gb in both XP and Red Hat.

[JTH]

Well you know kingsucka's theory about 3gig. per 40 now seems accurate. So what are the "hidden files" that Windows takes and what are their purpose?

[mjkovis]

Actually when you format your hardrive a partition is created for files and empty space. That is why you will be missing so many GB of memory. The files are just for the installation process for Windows. I am not sure what the files are exactly. Also the partition creates some empty space so that you do now overload the hardrive. Even though you may have a speedy hardrive and lots of space doesnt mean a thing cause they will still slow down considerably when you reach the full capacity.

[HAL9000]

Originally posted by JTH Well you know kingsucka's theory about 3gig. per 40 now seems accurate. So what are the "hidden files" that Windows takes and what are their purpose?

The big one is for the system restore feature... it reserves 10% of the drive capacity. There are no "hidden" partitions.