Reinstalled Vista - but where did my recovery partition go? plus I have Turbo Memory, huh?!

So I decided to do what everyone here suggested - Reinstalled Media Direct and then Vista - After an hours worth of OS and driver installs I just noticed that my d:\recover partition was never created (How the comp shipped originally). The other odd thing was that when Vista was installing, I could not create more partitions (As I could in a XP setup though this is my first time with Vista).

So right now I am stuck with 1 partition (160GB 7200) which is showing up as 145 GB with 133GB available. Does a 15GB loss sound right?

Did I do something wrong during the install and should I try and create 1 or 2 partitions. Pain in the Ass to reformat and reinstall, but is it worth it?

One more thing - when I was reinstalling drivers, Dell's driver utility recognized that I have Turbo Memory and installed drivers for this. I can't find this in device manager though and I thought that the new 1520's do not have turbo memory.

 

Anyone got any suggestions for me? Thanks.

 

On hard drive space, let's see:

hard drive manufactuers count 1GB as 1000^3.
windows counts 1GB as 1024^3

so: your hdd is 160*1000^3 = 160,000,000,000 / 1024^3 = 160,000,000,000 / 1073741824 = 149.0116119384765625 GB

4 GB descrepancy? i might be wrong....well you have to count the parition table for such a large drive.

 

yah but the partiton lable would be not that large would it

 

my 120gig advertised turns out to be a 111 gig usable under windows.

 

I wonder if I should do a reinstall - I'd like to have 3 partitions - a recover / An OS and files - but vista in the reinstall doesnt let me do that - Am I missing something??