[MAK b]

i bought my lenovo 3000-h 8823-3cq home pc with 80Gb hard disk,1Gb RAM .it has got 4 partition but the total space available its showing is only 69.5 Gb(as seen from My Computer).at first i thought it to be problem of shared memory than i made complaint to a local service centre he deleted the data and partions and than it showed 74 Gb of space , after again making 4 partition's the memory again dropped to69.5 Gb .10.5 Gb of hard disk is unavilable for me . cant digest that.cant understand the problem . please help.

[BOB]

When you partition a disk, your computer usually splits the disk into 4 seperate areas that your computer recoginzes as smaller disks. It could be a problem with your partitioning software.Try seeing if you have locked a partition.Also, somtimes when making a partition, the un-partitioned space is not reccognized by your pc.

[Wolfeymole]

For a start partitioning has nothing to do with how much memory you have.
Who configured these partitions Mak?

Where do you get this idea Bob;
"When you partition a disk, your computer usually splits the disk into 4 seperate areas that your computer recoginzes as smaller disks."?

Any partitions that do not contain system files ie Windows and have not been formatted will be classed as Unallocated Space.

[Hybr!d]

Something else to note.

If you buy a 160GB hard drive you don't actually get 160GB.

My 160GB is actually 149GB formatted.

You lose some space when formatted.

It's a bit like car engines, my car is a 2 litre, but it is actually 1896cc, not 2000cc.

Manufacturers like to round their figures up a bit.

Thats life.

[Wolfeymole]

Very true Dave and even it was a Recovery partition like Dell likes to use (a most disgusting practice imho) it would still not amount to 10.5GB.

[alex]

Dont forget, for marketing purposes manufacturers quote 1gb as 1000mb using the decimal method. But as windows etc reads the amount as binary it measures 1gb as 1024mb, so you'll always feel short changed on the capacity.

As an example, you may purchase a hdd with a quoted capacity 'on the box' of 250gb, but your o.s will 'lose' 24mb per gigabyte, so it will register as a capacity of 244gb when unformatted.

[kknight0506]

When you format your drive , new tracks and sectors are formed on that. It is stored in the file structure and this File Structure is used by the Operating System to retrieve your data from specific location in drives .

Thats why they are showing the less space than marked.

[Maria]

Hi MAK b

You don't see say 70GB on a 70GB HDD because it is rated like this ---

All computer data is stored in a binary format as either a one or zero. Eight of these bits together for the most commonly referred to item in computing, the byte. The various amounts of storage capacity are referred by a prefix to represent a specific amount, similar to the metric prefixes. Since all computers are based on binary math, these prefixes represent base 2 amounts. Each level is an increment of 2 to the 10th power or 1,024. The common prefixes are as follows:
• Kilobyte (KB) = 1,024 Bytes
• MegaByte (MB) = 1,024 Kilobytes or 1,048,576 Bytes
• Gigabyte (GB) = 1,024 Megabytes or 1,073,741,824 Bytes
• Terabyte (TB) = 1,024 Gigabytes or 1,099,511,627,776 Bytes

This is important information because when a computer operating system or program reports the available space on a drive, it is going to report the overall total of available bytes or reference them by one of the prefixes. So, an OS reporting a total space of 70GB actually has around 75,591,424,400 Bytes of storage space.
Yes i did use a calculator :)