missing gigs?

[trackcar]

Hi all.

erm, my new laptop is supposed to have a 40Gb hard drive, but when i right click for properties on the c: drive it says it's only 32gig and when i check how much free space is left it's down to 27gig .. does windows xp use 5gig of disk space? and where are my missing gigs to make it 40 gb? was it never there (ie my laptop hard drive isn't as big as advertised) or is this a common thing where advertised and real-life values are different? I'm pretty sure whever i've checked the hddon my pc it's always said what it's upposed to be (ie 20gb in that case)

any help greatfully appreciated

[BliarsGoing]

Probably got a hidden recovery partition on the HDD that works with the vendors recovery CD to recover the OS in a disaster.

[aldi]

Couple of reasons, firstly HDD sizes are quoted by manufacturers in multiples of 1000 bytes rather than multiples of 1024 bytes like the rest of the computing world uses to talk about sizes. Hence a 40 pretend-GB drive shows up as 30-odd real-GB.

Secondly, part of the disk may be set aside as a recovery / utility partition.

[_dobbo_]

The 1024/1000 megabyte thing only accounts for 1 lost GB. ie a 40GB disk is actually a 39.0625GB disk. There must therefor be another partition of about 7GB - probably as mentioned a recovery partition. This is what allows you to re-install the laptop back to factory defualts very easily.


Regarding the fact that 5GB is used already - that sounds a bit high for a clean install on a new laptop , you may have a great load of crap you don't need on there.

Download jdiskreport to find out where your space has gone.

[trackcar]

thanks for the replies
forgot to say there's Xp plus a load of other bundled software so that probably accounts for the rest of the loss, hadn't realised there might be a partioned portion of the drive for recovery, that all sounds very possible .. thankyou all

[sp60]

The NTFS or FAT allocation tables will also take up a reasonable amount of the drivespace.
Quoted drivespace is unformatted.