Laptop missing 20 GB?

I just received my Dell E1505 yesterday. I was wondering how many GB is usually used up when they're shipped to you. It's supposed to have 80 GB, but it's showing 68.4 GB as the total size and 60.3 GB of free space.

 

You may have some space being eaten up by a hidden recovery partition as well as a Media Direct partition (although I believe that one takes up very little room). Have you compared your hard drive space to that of other E1505 owners in the Dell forum yet? You might be able to get a better idea by posting a similar question there.

 

According to my calculations, your drive should show approx. 74,5gb (80000000000/1024/1024/1024)

Your missing 7GB. It's a lot, but it makes sense if you have a recovery partition and another partition for a direct play software !

 

I talked to Dell CSR yesterday and they're completely useless. My friend got the same deal at the same time I did, and his is showing the same thing so it's normal, I guess. It just seems like 20 gb is a lot of used up space.

 

I can confirm that you do have a recover partition at the end of your hdd. I just bought one also. It should take up approx 3-4 gigs. There is another partition at the beginning also that the recovery software resides. The first thing I did was to delete all partitions and start fresh. You can either use partition magic to delete/resize partitions without destroying your existing parition, or image everything using norton ghost (2003), delete all paritions using fdisk (dos) and restore the image. Or do what I did and start fresh and delete all the junk that dell puts onto new pcs.

go to: radified.com/index2.html for norton ghost tutorial

hope that helped.

 

Remember of course that an 80GB hard drive as pointed out above is really only about 75GB anyway, the problem is calculations, when quoting hard drive sizes for some reason they use the 1000kb = 1 MB type of calculation, rather than the actual 1024kb = 1 MB

 

80gig drivers are really like 75gigs so you losing like 7 gigs for recovery and stuff. seems about normal. personaly i would format as dells come with alot of **** installed.