Problem regarding hard drive space...help needed

Hey
I recently bought my dv6500 special edition notebook. right now i have installed a few softwares which at most would add up to be 10GB, my harddrive is meant to be 160 GB but i only have 82.6 free space. Furthermore, my harddrive was already devided into 2, one called C drive and other the Hp recovery drive. The recovery drive is just over 7 GB where as C is 141 GB (82 GB free), this adds up to 148 GB where is the rest 12 GB? can someone tell me how to free space cause i know i have loads sa junk from hp but i'm not sure if i'd free around 50GB from my C drive after uninstalling those softwares.
Thanks

 

hps and most notebooks nowadays are shppied with an recovery partition of maybe 10-15GB dpending on the model
the 12gb is in my opinion the recovery partitio unaccessible wich u can easily delete after you have created the recovery DVD's or CD's using the provided software such as roxio the other partition is for the user if you need to creats further partitions try udsing a software like partition magic or such
futhermore you loose a bit of ur total space when its formated but thats not such a huge amount wither
your hdd seems normal to me and so does the break up
u can easily uninstall your iuneeded apps using add remove under the control panel
cheers and all the best

 

ok i'll try uninstalling them, i didnt know u can delete the recovery thing after you've created recovery disks, any idea how you do that and combine it to one harddrive again.
cheers

 

hey
i selected all the folders in my C drive and checked the properties and it added up to 37 gb and when i open my computer it says c drive total 141gb and free 82gb... whys that?

 

The space of the laptop is reported in raw bytes before formatting.
Formatting and partitioning the hard drive uses up about 10 gigs, no joke.
So right off the bat, you only get about 150 of your 160 gig hard drive.

The best idea is to follow my guide and start over if you are computer savvy. Otherwise you'll just have to remove what you can.

 

You never get the advertised space on a Hard Drive. Go to the link I have posted below and read the "Capacity Measurements" section and you will understand why you can only use 148GB on a 160GB Hard Drive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk

 

Formatting a Hard Drive does not take up 10GB, read my above post and go to the hyperlink.

 

Yea, when a group of people define a kilobyte as 1000 bytes, then another group defines it as 2^10 (=1024), and you carry on this tradition into gigabyte and soon terabyte territory, the disparity will widen until it's no longer just a rounding error.

 

Sucks doesn't it Onyx. I remember when I didn't know and thought I got ripped off when I bought a 300GB HDD a long time ago and only 279GB was available.

 

robiva:
I know you are very active in the forum and you have a good guide put together. I've seen you respond to a few "hard disk space" posts, and you always seems to give the same answer, which, frankly, does not explain the huge missing pieces of disk space that people see missing in Vista. It would be more helpful if you could also give further explanation about what's going on in Vista, which is...

The Volume Shadow Copy Service. This service reserves by default %15 of the disk space for system restore points and previous file versions. As you use the system, this space starts to pile up, and suddenly you're missing giant parts of your free space. THIS IS THE MOST LIKELY REASON FOR "MISSING" SPACE IN VISTA.

Yeah, miscalculations when converting gigabytes to gibibytes can explain a some of the missing space, but that's pretty old information and almost everyone knows that now. Also, most people are looking at what explorer is telling them they have (total capacity vs free space), so those units are already correct.

Formatting the drive uses a minuscule amount of space when compared to the sizes of todays hard drives. It would never be in an amount that someone would complain about on a forum.

It would be great if you could mention volume shadow copy in the future.

 

cheers for the reply's , can is it possible to combine the harddrive into 1 again and can i delete the hp recovery drive once i've created the recovery disks?

 

Yes, you can either use Vista's built-in partition manager or any 3rd party partition utility.

 

;.........such as partition magic

 

Thanks for the reply. I go by what I see in real life and don't know much about the Shadow copy service in Vista.

Take this picture, it's from the 1st laptop I formatted which has a 120 gig drive.
http://www.nogodforme.com/images2007/HPDV6500T070.jpg
Total up the 1st four lines and you get 111 gigs. This picture was taken just after the drives were partitioned and formatted.

The same thing happened when I formatted a 160 gig drive, I got about 150 gigs at the end. There's 10 gigs used up by the formatting and the difference of raw versus the actual numbers.

 

Robvia,

Partitioning doesn't take up the drive space, it has to do with the calculations like in the hyperlink I posted. Even if you view a disk that hasn't been formatted and is all zeros you will never get the full advertised capacity. As stated inside wikipedia and many books I have read manufacturers use different measurements to report size. I work in computer forensics and have been around computers almost my entire life and I've seen many drives that are non-partitioned and zeroed out and never have the advertised capacity. If you haven't read my post I urge you to read it again, because having less than the advertised space on a HDD has nothing to do with partitioning.

 

Don't use partition magic.. its now called ghost and was bought out by none other then symantec and its crap.. I use Acronis disc director and it merged the recovery drive to the primary partition. I also used Acronis true image software to make a custom image. If you use Acronis, make sure you use the advanced settings, then you will see the merge option. I just used version 10 of both acronis disc director and true image and this software works like a charm... as always.

My main gripe is with how much space Vista takes by itself. A OS should not take 15 gigs by itself. But that is roughly what it takes and that is insane.

 

cheers again for the help i'll try vistas built in one and if it doesnt work then i'll try 3rd party