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    Missing 30gbs of HD space

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by pilotguy415, Jul 3, 2008.

  1. pilotguy415

    pilotguy415 Notebook Enthusiast

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    I have an Alienware M9750 laptop with two harddrives. One from factory 160gb hd and one from my old laptop thats 120gbs. When I got the laptop my factory HD read something around 158gbs or so. I had some issues (my fault) and I had to reinstall windows vista. When I did that I lost 20gbs of HD space. Now my HD is reading 140gbs of HD space. I checked out the disk management utility and found that it has a partition of 8gbs for EISA configuration. I did a google search and figure that might be important so I didnt do anything with that. My 120gb HD was reading it had 9mbs of unalocated space. I expanded that but that still doesnt account for all the missing space.

    OH, I just realized that I didnt mention my 120gb HD is reading only 111gbs. The old HD is completely formatted so it shouldnt have anything on it hidden away.

    I ran a program called HDD capacity restore but it said my HD is reporting factory capacity. So does anyone have a clue where my missing 30gigs is? and how I might go about recovering it?

    Thanks in advance :)
     
    pilotguy415, Jul 3, 2008
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  2. Lithus

    Lithus NBR Janitor

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    A 160 GB HDD is actually 149 GB, a 120 GB HDD is actually 111 GB. This is due to the difference between binary and decimal.

    This has been discussed many times already. You are not missing any space.
     
    Lithus, Jul 3, 2008
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  3. lowlymarine

    lowlymarine Notebook Deity

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    This is because Hard Drive manufacturers use Gigabyte to mean 1 billion bytes. While this is technically correct assuming giga-, mega-, and kilo- are used as metric prefixes, a kilobyte in computing is actually 1024 bytes, a megabyte 1024 kilobytes, and a gigabyte 1024 megabytes. Thus, 1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824 bytes, meaning a 160 "metric (decimal) gigabyte" hard drive is only ~149 "binary gigabytes." This isn't true of RAM and some flash memory, since they operate on different principals than magnetic storage.

    New prefixes have been proposed to rectify this issue and make things clearer to consumers; sadly, they've not been put into common usage (yet). Seagate lost a class-action lawsuit about this recently; sadly, the settlement payout was pathetic and not worth collecting (some piece of backup software rather than simply cash).
     
    lowlymarine, Jul 3, 2008
    #3