80 gig WD not all there 4

[xit]

Friend brought by his computer which has an 80 gig WD hard drive but Windows XP states it is only 74 gig. After questioning he said a linux install went bad and that was the amount of space he had allocated to the linux install, so I tried fdisk with a boot disk and it shows the 74 gig drive with just the one primary partition. I even formatted the drive and still shows 74 gig. How do I recover his lost space since it show only one partition?
Would a low level format work?

thanks

xit

 

[davidma]

I think hd manufacurers round up the amount on a hard drive, I also have an 80gig that shows up as 74.

A 20 gig is really about 17.6 or 18 and so on.

 

[cdogg]

Actually all you need is a calculator!

Everything is in multiples of 1024:

1024 bytes = 1 KB
1024 KB = 1 MB
1024 MB = 1 GB

That's 1,073,741,824 bytes in a single GB. Well, hard drive manufacturers assume there are only 1,000,000,000 bytes in a gig. So they actually sold you a drive that has 80,000,000,000 bytes.

If you take 80,000,000,000 divided by the true number of bytes in a gig (1,073,741,824), you come up with only 74.5GB! Talk about false advertising!!

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[micker377]

Man, I hate those big numbers this late at night <grin>! But he's right. Even floppies (remember them?), were actually 2 meg raw - even though they were listed as 1.4 meg, due to formatting and "overhead". This was the size stated for DOS systems, Apple and Commadore were different sizes when you format the raw 2 meg disks.

 

[cdogg]

Well in this case, however, you're not losing space due to formatting. It was never there to begin with! Unformatted or new out of the box, the drive is still only 74.5GB. I just want to be clear on that.

Since computers operate in bits that have two states, 0 and 1, everything is in the base power of 2 (2^10 = 1024) or binary.

Hard drive ratings, however, are in the wrong base. They use decimal, which is base power of 10 (10^3 = 1000). That isn't compatible with PC's, which is why you think you are buying more than you really are.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[xit]

Thanks all for your input, I was aware the size actually did not match, guess my brain want south with all the Linux problems he was having, I overlooked the obvious.

Thanks for jumpstarting my brain.

xit

 

[garebo]

If you are installing win xp, when done go to disk management and make sure its all one partition.
I installed an extermal usb drive to find that there was a small, 1 gig space that was unallocated and a 74 gig space that was formatted, all on one 80 gig drive. My figures could be out a bit, but the point is that there was an unallocated space there and i wouldnt have known about it unless i looked in disk management.

Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[xit]

Thanks garebo for the tip.
I checked in disk management and it shows 74.52 gig on a single partition so I am up and running. All is good.

xit

 

[garebo]

sounds like!


Good advice + great people = tek-tips

 

[020785]

It was never there they round up the amount of the drive size.

 

[cdogg]

020785:

- No rounding involved, see my posts above (the number always makes sense and is not randomly rounded)

- This thread is over a month old

- Thread originator acknowledged that this was answered

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884