Shrinking HDD on Dell following flatten to rebuild

[KeithD]

Based on advice received in the Malware forum, which was corroborated elsewhere, I have run DBAN to get rid of a bad virus (RAMNIT.AS) on my Dell XPS 8500 that is able to infect Master Boot Record, hence the ned to wipe everything including Dell's System Restore Partition

Upon reinstalling Windows from a reinstallation DVD I am finding that the hard disk, which is supposed to be 1TB, only shows 931GB.

I think that the missing 69GB is about the size that the recovery partition would have had. DBAN should have overwritten the whole disk, including the recovery partition. Certainly I can no longer see the usual options when attempting to boot with F8 so I think it must be gone, but I am just wondering:
1) can I be sure that the recovery partition (and virus) are really gone, and
2) does anyone know what might have happened to my 69GB and whether there is any way to get it back?

Thanks!

 

[KeithD]

Problem resolved, I think: it's a math problem, not a Windows problem: when they sell you an HDD with '1TB' from Dell you actually 'only' GET 1 million million bytes (1,000,000,000,000) but a Gigabyte is actually 1024^3 bytes, ie approximately 1,073 million bytes. You can only fit 931 of those in 10^12 bytes...

 

[captaincranky]

Math issue or not. that's all a 1TB drive shows after it's been formatted. A 750GB drive comes in at 698GB, and so forth.

In fact, I think if you use the factor .931, and multiply any advertised drive capacity by it, you'll get the approximate formatted size of the drive.