Not showing 40gb only 32.8 total

[Ben_15]

I helped my friend purchase a new HP Pavilion
7955. It has a 40gb segate drive installed
running on Win XP. When clicking on my computer and C: drive it is only diplaying 32.8gb. I have since gone to Comp USA and checked other HP Pavilions and they to only show 32.8gb. I decided to to check a Sony while I was there and their advertised 40gb was displaying 39.8gb. What is going on with the HP's???

[Vincent Fleming]

The 40GB advertised drive size is approximate; meaning that it's about 40GB of "raw, unformatted space". Most manufacturers do it this way. The net amount of space you see from Explorer will vary because of a number of reasons...

Here's a few reasons why it's smaller:

formatting reduces usable space
NTFS/FAT filesystem overhead reduces space
FDISK may have partitions on the disk
(it's common to have diagnostics on a separate partition)

So, if your Pavillion has a 40.0GB disk (raw), you could easily lose a few GB's to overhead such as the above. Sony might not be using the same FS, may not have a diag partition, and may actually be using a somewhat larger drive, such as a 42.7GB or something.

If you're really curious, look at the drive itself - it should be stamped with the drive size right on the top. Then look in FDISK at the partitions that are on the disk. Look at their sizes and do the math yourself - blocks or sectors are 512 bytes.

Good luck

[Ben_15]

I agree with some overhead but not enough where you would lose aprrox 7gb. I looked at the name and model of the drive in the Pavilion and according to Seagate you should get approx 40gb after formatting. Is it possible that these drives were improperly formatted by HP. Also I have used FDISK in the past to view a drives size but low and behold Win XP does not have this function in command mode and there is no DOS.

[Vincent Fleming]

Does XP have a disk administrator?

[Ben_15]

Need to look into. XP system not at work.
Talking with other people a bit more knowledgeable agree that there needs to be more. We believe that this disk hit a barrier when formatted by HP and that you should be able the partition the remainder and make it D: drive. Just need to figure out how to do it through Win XP, know how to do it through previous versions of windows using FDISK.

[Ben_15]

After further investigation and finding Win XP's disk administrator I have found out that HP has created a hidden partition for their recovery disk area that takes up 4.5gb's. This partition is formatted as a FAT32 and the rest of the drive is NTFS. I quess I have finally answered my own question but I am disappointed in HP support which I have sent 3 3 mails over the last two weeks and never got the correct answer from them. Quess I'm buying a Sony.