Harddrive Problem with New Vista

shyleshno1 said:

but the harddrive is showing that its only 285GB instead of a 320GB, and Hp is basically useless on that..we spent like hours on the phone trying to figure that part..i mean we reinstalled the Harddrive on the laptop and its STILL showing smaller size, what do you guys think the problem is...I mean i would LOVE to have my computer show a harrdrive size of 320 stead of 285.

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Hi shyleshno1,

If you had a 320gig hard drive, once the HD is formatted, it will lose some space, that's not unusual.

Here's an example of my hard drives - I have two 500gig hard drives, but once formatted they became 465.7 gig hard drives, and my once 320gig hard drive is now 298gig. See my image -



Why this happens - Hard drive manufactures measure use 1000 MB per GB, but the actual conversion is 1024 MB per GB, since it's based on base 2. (2^10) The size reported by your computer is based on the correct 1024 MB/GB number.

Example - Manufacturers sell the drive based on 1GB=1000MB, 1MB=1000kb 1KB=1000bytes, etc. However hard drives are formatted like this: 1GB=1024MB, 1MB=1024kb, 1KB=1024bytes, etc. Read more here - Why do hard drives have less space than they are advertised? My...

Now why is your HD at 285 instead of 298? Maybe a hidden partition? Again, HP should have been able to explain this.

But the bottom line is that yes... you will lose hard drive space on a formatted HD, that's not unusual, and you see this all the time when you format a CD or DVD.

Hope this helps ease your tension.