Hard drive wont show all the gigs

[[NeoZeeD]]

hi i have a 30 gig western digital HD, i installed windows and when i clicked on C: drive in my computer it says the capacity is 27 gigs. what happened to my 3 gigs?
in bios my HD is set to auto, i went to dos with startup disk removed partiton rebooted created partiton fdisk/mbr x3 fomratted it a couple of times and still shows the same. i have two hard drives in my computer i had similar problem before with my 10 gig HD it showed 8 gigs. but since that is my secondary HD now it show it has a capacity of 9.54 gigs or something, so thats normal . but im not sure what happened to the other 3 gigs with my 30 gig HD. i use to have winME and it showed the same thing too for my 30 gig.but when i run a scandisk in dos it doesnt show any bad sectors says everything is ok.

please help or if you have any good advice,

[ShadowKing]

If I am not mistaken, that is space taken up by formatting. When a disk is formatted it creates a File Allocation Table. This is just basically an index to where the actual data for the files lies.

My home drive is a 62GB drive and it formats down to 57.5 GB.

So I guess that is normal...

[Jeff the Brit]

You haven't been ripped off ... just two different measurements here. Drive manufacturers always quote their drive capacities defining 1 megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes and one gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. DOS/Windows, on the other hand defines a megabyte as 1048576 bytes (4.8% bigger), or 1024 x 1024. A DOS/Windows gigabyte is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 or 1073741824 bytes (7.4% bigger). Computers work in binary or powers of 2, remember? 1024=2^10 Hope this clarifies things.

[[NeoZeeD]]

that makes sence, but before i had the same problem with a 10 gig drive and when my ten gig was the primary it showed i had like 8 gigs on there and since this 10 gig drive became the secondary drive now it showing i have 9.54 gigs on it. shouldnt have my HD stayed the same when i changed it to a secondary drive.
hmmm this gives me an idea to try something... <IMG SRC="smilies/eek.gif" border="0">

thanks guys for your input <IMG SRC="smilies/biggrin.gif" border="0">

[Snommis69]

Originally posted by Jeff the Brit:
<STRONG>You haven't been ripped off ... just two different measurements here. Drive manufacturers always quote their drive capacities defining 1 megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes and one gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. DOS/Windows, on the other hand defines a megabyte as 1048576 bytes (4.8% bigger), or 1024 x 1024. A DOS/Windows gigabyte is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 or 1073741824 bytes (7.4% bigger). Computers work in binary or powers of 2, remember? 1024=2^10 Hope this clarifies things.</STRONG>

Right on the money, Jeff! This is tech spec vs. marketing, all the way. With the older, smaller drives noone noticed. But now, with the big drives, oh what a difference!

[grosas9]

on top of the marketing scam, you also lose some space in the format and partition

[Fubarian]

scam? hardly....

Windows uses binary to do megs of HD space, ram, ect. Just like how 32000kb of ram isn't 32megs (ever notice how ram goes to like 528 when you have 512?) Anyway, windows uses binary and the HD people use decimal...just the way its always been.

Check capacity by right clicking on yer drive, going to properties and checking out the lil pie graph - see where it says capacity? ....should be 27,000,000 bytes (give or take a few)