missing approx 17gig of space

hey guys,

as the title suggests my xps 1530 appears to be missing 17gig of space. I initially removed vista and installed xp I was left with 3 partitions (220gig - 10gig - 3gig) I wanted to remove all bloatware and regain all space in one partition so I ran the guide from this forum, I ended up with 2 partitions, 1 = 230gig and 1 = 3gb. The drive is suppose to be 250gb in total so where has the remaining 17gig gone? I checked the bios it states the drive is 250gb, the media drive cd states I have a possible 233gig to distribute as does windows.

Any ideas?

 

The 250gb is unformatted capacity. Once you format it, it loses capacity.

 

That's crap. Formatting doesn't do anything to your capacity. It's just the difference between KiB and KB or MiB and MB. There are 250 billion bytes on that hard drive, but to your computer, every 1024 bytes is a kilobyte, every 1024 kilobytes is a megabyte, every 1024 megabytes is a gigabyte, blah blah blah, so you always see less than the advertised capacity.

 

The difference is due to the difference between binary and decimal measurement. Computers use binary, but they sell by decimal because it sounds like more. Multiply 250 by 0.93 to get the approximate binary measurement that computers will report.

 

It's a marketing ploy by the hard drive manufacturers to make hard drives look larger than what they actually are. Both numbers are correct, just different measurements.