Cannot utilize the whole drive

[atif72]

I am using XP professional.
I have a 120 Gig Drive.
But it only sees 114 Gig ?
I cant seem to retrieve the 6 Gig

I reinstalled XP and partitioned the
drive to 4 Gig system (fat32) and the rest
NTFS, but again it seems like 9 Gig is
missing ?

Any reason why this is happening

 

[linney]

It's a case of how you measure a megabyte. The following is from the web. (Also in a FAT32 system space is wasted due to cluster size).



"If you read the fine print on a retail Maxtor or Western Digital hard drive box, they state that they consider a Megabyte to be 1,000,000 bytes, when in actuality it's 1,048,576 bytes.

So, when Western Digital sells you a "100" Gigabyte drive, they're really selling you a 95.36 Gigabyte drive .

100,000,000 bytes / 1,048,576 bytes = 95.36 Gigabyte"

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...=gb%2Bmissing%2Bdrive&hl=en&lr=&start=10&sa=N

http://groups.google.com/groups?sourceid=navclient&q=gb+missing+drive

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=gb+missing+drive

 

[EddieVenus]

Actually it is a case of that sometimes, most drives are measured accuratley now, but it loses alot in the formating. I have the IBM 120gig and I get 117 Gig out of it. I know that I have 121.xx gigs when I boot up, but then once windows takes over I only have 117, but that is what you get for formating a drive. If you want more space you need to format and partition the drive to use Fat32 16k clusters and make the drive sizes 2gigs, but then you get 60 drives on your disk. And who wants that. If you get partion magic it will show you what you can do in terms of drive size, how much you will lose, and all that jazz. However, the smaller the cluster the slower the OS is to use large files, the faster it is use smaller ones, and the less space you lose to formating. But you also can only make a drive so large with small cluster. The bigger the cluster the better it is on the OS and the larger the drive can be. But you lose more room to the overhead of formatting. Your choice, but I since Xp unlike previous MS OS's handle single large drives better than multiple small ones. I choose to make my whole drive NTFS and a large enough cluster size to get my whole drive as one partition. I have multiple drives and so do not need multiple partions on the main drive.