Lost GIGS from HD

[jbutvin]

Just wondering, this may be a stupid question.

When setting up windows xp through their format disc (with the bluescreens and such) you have the option to to format drives and install XP to a particular drive. One thing I noticed is that you can also create partitions for a drive. In my computer I have 120, 250, and 40 gig hard drives, but for some reason, it never alowed me to make a drive the actual space of the hard drive. Is this something common with hard drives, that they save some gigs for memory or something, or am I doing something wrong? For instance, the 120 only lets me use 113 gigs when i format it then make it into a new partition. Any ideas?

puke: Thanks.

 

[pip22]

The discrepancy between what you expect and what you actually get is normal. Disk manufacturers quote a gigabtye = 1000 megabytes, when in fact it's actually 1024 megabytes. This discrepancy starts at the 'byte' level (there are actually 1024 bytes in a kilobyte - the makers quote this as 1000 again, and same for kilobytes, again it's actually 1024 in a megabyte, not 1000. By the time you work this out right up to the gigabyte level the discrepency is quite large, and obviously gets worse as the capacity increases.

 

[jbutvin]

Thanks, I read something like that from an earlier post about terrabytes and I think chicibytes. Anyhow, kinda sucks but I guess there is nothing I can really do about it. Thanks for clearing it up though.