Where is my hard drive gigs?

Luther · Post by **Luther** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 4:28 pm

Operating a new Dell E 1505, 2 gigs of RAM, supposedly ordered a 120 gig hard drive. System is one of those core duo processors. Anyway, I went to "My computer" and see that I have two hard drives, C and D. I guess this is because of the duo processor, yes? I click on the C drive and see that the total size is 79.1 gig, and the size on the D drive is 26.1 gig

That only totals to 105.2 gigs.

Ah, what happened to the other 15 gig?

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Mister Bushice · Post by **Mister Bushice** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 7:42 pm

#1. are you looking at space available, instead of total space? That 15 gig could be being used by the built in programs that came with your system.

#2. If not, did you contact Dell, and ask them?

It IS under warranty. 15 gig shouldn't be unaccounted for on a new box. I have an external drive 0f 160 GB, and after partitioning it 4 times I lost very little to formatting in each partition.

Luther · Post by **Luther** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 10:58 pm

Yeah, I see both free and total space, what I listed was total space. One must properly work themselves u[ into dialing Dell's support line. One must have limber fingers and a clear voice to handle all the "press 2 now," or saying "say I don't know."

So what happens if Dell actually screwed up and gave me the wrong hard drive? Ask me to box up this one, and mail it back to them right after I get the replacement in a few weeks time? I spent a lot of time tweeking this or that, adding other programs, getting rid of preinstalled stuff. Spending at least a few hours doing all that might be about 15 gigs worth of hassle. bwahahaha

I think I answered my own question.

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Shlomart Ben Yisrael · Sun Oct 15, 2006 10:59 pm

I'm thinking your DELL has a hidden partition for System Recovery.

It probably contains an image of your operating system as it was delivered to you, should you ever decide to wipe the
hard drive and restore it to factory settings.

Mister Bushice · Post by **Mister Bushice** » Sun Oct 15, 2006 11:27 pm

why would a diagnostic partition be hidden? Is that something new? and 15 gigs? No way.

I have three dells, two are laptops, and none of them have that. recovery used to just need MBs, not GBs.

edit:

From everything I've read, that would seem to be the case. seems absurdly large, 15 gigs. WOuldn't it be better to just burn a CD with the system recovery files on it, so you have the 15 gig to use?

Donovan · Post by **Donovan** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 12:22 am

read this: http://compreviews.about.com/od/storage ... DSizes.htm

Your 120gb harddrive will appear to Windows to be just under 112gb. I'm guessing the rest of the "missing" space is hidden, like Martyred said.

Mister Bushice · Post by **Mister Bushice** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 12:39 am

Wow. That sucks. I guess Dell is no longer issuing system recovery disks. They're putting that on the HD itself. I'll have to keep that in mind next time I order one.

Luth, you probably would void your warranty if you reformatted the drive to recapture some of the missing space taken up by the recovery stuff, so I'm guessing you're stuck with it.

Shlomart Ben Yisrael · Mon Oct 16, 2006 1:00 am

Mister Bushice wrote:Wow. That sucks. I guess Dell is no longer issuing system recovery disks.

No, but I do believe there are utilities included in the DELL software package to create your own Recovery Disks.

That, or use Acronis or Ghost to make your own drive image.

Mister Bushice · Post by **Mister Bushice** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 1:25 am

Yeah but there's no real need for a recovery unless you plan to reformat, and that is not an easy task for someone who doesn't know how to do it.

Plus I do think it would void the warranty, so you'd have to burn an image of the recovery partition too if you wanted to get any service work done.

ElTaco · Post by **ElTaco** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 1:38 am

I should mention that a 120 Gig HD doesn't actually necessarily give you 120gig drive. It will usually be 'missing' a few gigs. Basically, when your HD is made, they test it and if it only has a few sectors that are unreadable, it still gets labled as the original intended drive and released for sale.

Mister Bushice · Post by **Mister Bushice** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 2:09 am

I know that but 15 gigs seems excessive, don't you think?

Luther · Post by **Luther** » Mon Oct 16, 2006 4:07 pm

I went to a tech forum for Dell's, and found this Link.

[align=center]

Why is the reported capacity of my hard disk drive (HDD) less than the size of the HDD that I ordered on my Dell™ computer?

Table of Contents
1. Calculate the hard drive size in bytes using base-2 math.

1. Calculate the hard drive size in bytes using base-2 math.

Most operating systems define a hard disk drive's capacity using binary or base-2 mathematics. This translates to 1 gigabyte (GB) equal to 1,073,741,824 bytes. This is the correct value when using binary or base-2 mathematics.
However, hard disk drive manufacturers define drive sizes using base-10 mathematics, in which 1 GB is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes (rather than the 1,073,741,824 bytes, as listed above).

This discrepancy in reporting drive sizes (base-2 vs. base-10) may lead you to believe that you have a hard disk drive of less than expected capacity if you compare the figure reported by the operating system with the figure reported by your documentation, although the actual hard drive size is identical. Microsoft® Windows® counts the size differently, and will report a different, slightly smaller, figure.

Base10 Base2
36GB 34.3GB
40GB 38.1GB
73GB 69.6GB
80GB 76.3GB
100GB 95.4GB
120GB 114.4GB
146GB 139.2GB
160GB 152.6GB
200GB 190.7GB
250GB 238.4GB
300GB 286.1GB
500GB 476.8GB
750GB 715.3GB
1000GB 953.7GB

Table 1 - Base-10 (Advertised Capacity) vs. Base-2 (Literal Capacity) Drive Size Comparisons

Return to Overview

Technical Tip
Release Date: 9/28/2005
Document Number: 163469

[/align]

Oh, OK. Base 2, Bace 10 ? I don't care, "ALL OUR BASE BELONG TO US."

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