New harddrive, missing about 10gb

i dont get what you just said. i know you can put it into simpler terms to where it is that those 10gb went to.

can anyone else help?

160 BILLION BYTE drive will show 149 GigaBytes in Windows. Which is proper.

Nothing may be amiss.

Bob

It's all a matter of what formula you use to figure out the HD capacity.
The manufacture will divide the number of bytes capacity of the HD, in your case 160 billion bytes, by 1000. This give you a 160 GB drive.
WIndows, on the other hand, uses a different formula. It will divide the 160 billion by 1024 which will give you 149 GB drive. Just like Bob said.
Other OS's report is a similar fashion.
So you can see, it is all a matter of how you do the math.

P

Giga is the prefix for billion! So a 160 billion byte drive is 160 GB, without any factor being applied. 160 billion divided by 1000, as mrmacfixit suggested, would be 160 million, or 160 Megabytes. This is in the decimal system.

However, computers are binary machines. Two to the 10th power is 1024, so at one time computer scientists decided to call this a binary kilo because of its similar magnitude to the decimal (true) kilo of 1000.

In the decimal system 1000 squared is a million, prefix Mega; 1000 cubed is a billion, prefix Giga; and 1000 to the 4th is a trillion, prefix Tera. In the binary system, by analogy, 1024 squared is 1,048,576, a binary mega, 1024 cubed is 1,073,741,824, a binary giga; and so on.

Now, divide the true size, 160 GB decimal, by the binary giga, and you will see that the binary size reported by Windows is 149 GB (binary) as BOB said.

Hope this helps

Frank

Okay, so I've known for quite a while that at least a little bit of storage will "disappear." For example, floppies actually hold 1.38 MB of storage, not 1.44.
I just bought a 200 GB HDD, and all that shows up is 160. Is it natural to be missing FORTY gigs (why can't the PC and HDD factories just agree)?
Thanks, have a good day/evening.

-Christopher

in my previous post. There generally is nothing missing; it is just that different units are used for the measure. For example: if you put exactly 1 gallon of water in a container in the US, then took it to Canada and measured it there, it would be 0.833 gallons. If you loaded a ton of something in a country using the metric (long) ton, and brought it to the US, you would have 2.22 tons here. No, you did not really lose or gain anything; the quantity is just measured in differeent units that happen to have the same name. the terms gallon and ton mean different things to differeent peoples.

It is the same with disks; there are two different meanings to the prefix giga. Most people, probably 99 % of the population, think and work in the decimal system; to these a giga is one billion, or 1,000,000,000. For some computer programmers and computer scientists, a giga is based on the binary system and is 1,073,741,824, as explained in my previous post.

You said that you have long known that a floppy only contains 1.38 MB. Actually it contains 1,457,664 bytes. this is truly 1.457 megabytes. The 1.38 MB value is not ''true'' in the ordinary sense because it does not realy mean 1.38 million (1.38 X 1,000,000), but rather 1.38 X 1,048,576, which is 1.447 megabytes. (The difference between 1.447 and 1.457 is due to rounding error.)

With respect to your drive: a 200 GB drive should be reported as 186 GB (binary), not 160 GB. I suggest you look at your disk properties in My Computer. There the capacities and usages are reported as both the true value in bytes, and the truncated ''binary'' value. The capacity in bytes, the true value, should be about 200,000,000,000. If it is significantly less than this, might there be a hidden partition of about 26 GB using that space? Let me know what you see there.

As to why the two different values are used: The disk manufactruers report the size in the commonly accepted terms -- what most people would consider the true value. Programs generally report the other value because it is simpler to calculate in binary arithmetic used by computers. This saves the programmer some effort, and lets the computer run faster.

My advice, don't sweat the difference between the two reporting systems. Nothing is missing or lost.

Hope this helps

Frank

>>With respect to your drive: a 200 GB drive should be reported as 186 GB (binary), not 160 GB.
>186 does sound more reasonable...

>>hidden partition ~ 26GB
>Well, I got the HDD in the store brand new, then (first) attached it to a PC running XP (no SP). So of course all it wanted to do is show 137GB, or so. But then, I went to use it as a new boot HDD, so I formatted, and thought I partitioned it to use the full value. But it only shows 160, as I say. Maybe it's faulty, or something.
I guess I could try to use this program, zapart which gets rid of all the files and stuff like that, then format it, and then use fdisk to - no, I couldn't do that, because it's too large for DOS to see, right (in the way that its file system is NTFS)?
I don't know, this is all confusing.
If there is a hidden partition, how can I get to it?
Thanks, bye.
-Christopher

1. http://www.48bitlba.com

All you need to know about over 127GB drives.

2. KNOPPIX.

Use http://www.google.com , make a KNOPPIX boot CD and see if it sees your hidden partitions.

Bob