unallocated HDD space.....What is it????

Here are some pics:

Zoom in 2 make the pic clear

 

Unallocated space is potentially usable space on your hard drive that hasn't been assigned to a partition. To put it another way, the disk is a box with a panel in it. The space is there, but you cant get to it. You need to adjust the partitioning of your hard disk to use this space. A tool like gnome partition editor (great, easy to use and free download off the net) will do this.

Grand Admiral

 

Or the extend function of diskpart can do that too.

 

Could it be a recovery partition?

What size is your hard drive supposed to be? ie my 160GB hard drive comes out as 149GB after formatting in NTFS

 

I didn't see any unallocated space (or references thereto) in the supplied pictures. What makes you think you even have any?

This said, you probably do. Partitions tend to be allocated in multiples of blocks of certain size. It often happens that the disk size is not exactly divisible by the block size, so you end up with some megabytes unallocated because the next-larger block size would have made the partition larger than the entire disk drive. You could make a second (or third or fourth) partition in there to "cover" that "lost" space, but we're talking a few megabytes on a muti-gigabyte disk, so most wouldn't care. I suspect that's the kind of unallocated space you are referring to.

 

well i was told that it must be unallocated space in another thread

Well if it isnt unallocated space, what is it then???

 

I'm not sure what you're referring to (the big grey space?), but here are some things that can affect your free HD space.

 

The big grey patch is free space and the the big yellow patch is unknown space