Hard Drive

[Ajay]

I just recently purchased a new system from Mem Express. It's a packaged deal with advertises a 200GB hard drive. Now when I went to install my Windows XP all went smoothly but after everything was configured when I went into My Computer it showed my C: drive as being 127GB total with 124 GB available.

My question is......where did my other 70+GB go? I understand Windows uses some up but definetly not 70GB. Is there some BIOS setting I need to configure? Thanks in advance.

[gpomp]

install sp1 or sp2. or use partition magic. xp has a 138 gb cap

[heinz256]

i think u gotta enable it in control panel:

Control Panel > Administrative tools > Computer Management > storage > disc management

im porlly wrong though

[lint]

I had the same problem. You need a win XP disk with sp2 or else you can't access the rest of your drive. Google it, I had the same problem, and there was a tutorial on how to create a new XP boot disk wth SP2.

[Ajay]

I figured it out after trying a couple different things. I installed Win XP with SP2 and it still said I had a 127GB hard drive. I went into my Admin options and 58.82GB was sitting there "unallocated" so I formatted that in Windows and BAM I had that 58.82GB at my disposal.

Now my question is why do I only have a total of 185.82GB available to me and how can I put this new partition (58.82) with the original (127)? Or is that wise to do?

Thanks in advance.

[viperous]

Well..it sounds a lot better now.

You'll NEVER get the total gb that you have purchase. All the hard drives i've ever gotten, i've lost some gbs.

Take my 300 gb for an example. Total Space - 279gb. That's 21 gb missing.'

My 74 gb raptor. - 69.2 gb. 4.8 gb missing.

I don't know, haven't researched it, but it's natural to lose that much i guess.

[Xtrema]

Originally posted by Ajay
Now my question is why do I only have a total of 185.82GB available to me and how can I put this new partition (58.82) with the original (127)? Or is that wise to do?

Advertised GB = 1000Kbytes
Actual GB = 1024Kbytes

200GB = 200 X 1000 / 1024 = 195GB.

Plus you'll lose some due to the file system format. 185GB is about right.

And HDs are so cheap these days, if you are out of room, just throw another one at it.

[GoChris]

Originally posted by viperous
Well..it sounds a lot better now.

You'll NEVER get the total gb that you have purchase. All the hard drives i've ever gotten, i've lost some gbs.

Take my 300 gb for an example. Total Space - 279gb. That's 21 gb missing.'

My 74 gb raptor. - 69.2 gb. 4.8 gb missing.

I don't know, haven't researched it, but it's natural to lose that much i guess.

No, you aren't losing any.

Hard drive manufacturers do not use the proper conversion when labelling a drive.

A gigabyte should be 1,073,741,824 bytes but they dont use powers of 2, they just use multiples of 1000. so they rate a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes.

hope that explains it a bit better. sorta false advertising.

edit: haha xtrema beat me to it :)

[GTS Jeff]

Originally posted by Ajay
I figured it out after trying a couple different things. I installed Win XP with SP2 and it still said I had a 127GB hard drive. I went into my Admin options and 58.82GB was sitting there "unallocated" so I formatted that in Windows and BAM I had that 58.82GB at my disposal.

Now my question is why do I only have a total of 185.82GB available to me and how can I put this new partition (58.82) with the original (127)? Or is that wise to do?

Thanks in advance. Combining 2 active partitions? I believe you have to use partition magic. You can download a copy of that off Limewire or something.

[Ajay]

Went about it another way. I deleted both partitions in Windows setup so I had one raw large partition and from that I created a 10GB partition to install just Windows in. After that was done I went back into my admin options and had another 176GB sitting there so I partitioned that and BAM everything is good. Actually ended up gaining a little more space than I had originally!

Thanks for all the help