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    Help With Partitions

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by frugihoyi, Sep 21, 2007.

  1. frugihoyi

    frugihoyi Notebook Guru

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    Here is what my disk looks like in Partition Magic:

    [​IMG]

    My disk is actually 160GB, but the capacity is only showing up as 111. I know you always get a little less usable space than what is advertised, but 49GB seems like a lot to me. Do you see the white space on the right side of my C partition? I am thinking maybe that part is not being used. Am I right? If so, how can I turn it into usable space?
     
    frugihoyi, Sep 21, 2007
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  2. TuxDude

    TuxDude Notebook Deity

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    No the white space represents the unused space of your drive C:

    I think you might be having just a 120 GB hard drive....

    What is the size reported by the BIOS ? And if possible let me know the hard disk model reported by the BIOS during startup or you can also check the same by going into the BIOS Setup screen....
     
    TuxDude, Sep 21, 2007
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  3. PhoenixFx

    PhoenixFx Notebook Virtuoso

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    Manufacturers advertise disk size in GigaBytes with a value of 1000^3 bytes (literally taking the value of Giga), where as in computer science a GigaByte is 1024^3 Bytes. This always gives a smaller size in actual GigaBytes than the advertised size. However that is not the problem here, because if we calculate the size considering what i said above it should show 149GB. However, if you calculate the size for a 120GB => 120 x 1000^3/1024^3 = 111GB, which is what you get.

    This can mean two things:
    1. You have a 120GB hard disk
    2. Partition magic is not showing the (hidden??) DELL recovery and MediaDirect partitions. (unlikely)
     
    PhoenixFx, Sep 21, 2007
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  4. TuxDude

    TuxDude Notebook Deity

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    I dont think case 2 is possible because even if it does not show those two partitions loss of more than 35 GB is unacceptable since those two partitions will usually sum to something around 10 - 15 GB max....
     
    TuxDude, Sep 21, 2007
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  5. PhoenixFx

    PhoenixFx Notebook Virtuoso

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    Yeah, you are right. They shouldn’t take more than 15GB. which leaves only one possibility.
     
    PhoenixFx, Sep 21, 2007
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  6. frugihoyi

    frugihoyi Notebook Guru

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    Um, how do I put this... I'm an idiot. For some reason, I forgot my HD is actually only 120. I don't know why I was thinking it was 160... sorry to waste your time.
     
    frugihoyi, Sep 22, 2007
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