18Gb of HDD gone - where?

I have an Acer 3600GT with 80GB hard drive.
The original partitions and sizes were:
C: primary - 36.26GB
D: local - 36.26GB
EISA: - 20.1GB

They were all FAT32 format. Last month I reformatted D: partition to NFTS and immediately lost half the space. Display now shows only 18.1 GB in that partition.
Neither of the other partitions are showing changed size to allow for the loss.
Over the weekend I cleared D: partition and reformatted back to FAT32, but still it's showing only 18GB. How can I reclaim my lost GBs?:cry

 

Maybe I'm missing something, but the math doesn't compute.

36.26 + 36.26 + 20.1 = 92GB.

Yet you have an 80gb hard disk. Then couple that with the fact that hard drive manufacturers use a conversion factor of 1000MB =1GB, then the largest an 80GB drive can really be is 80000 / 1024 = 78.12500GB.


Then throw in that every hard disk has a few MB of unuseable space, and you usually average around 74GB disk size. The discrepancy becomes larger with bigger drivers.

So, 92GB - 74GB = 18GB

There is your missing space. You never had it in the first place.

 

Now, looking at the original post, did you mean you have two drives?

Because EISA has nada to do with hard disks.

Edit: I've been corrected that EISA is referring to your recovery partition.

Once again--it doesn't add up.

 

Thanks for the response Adrynalyne. I understand what you're saying, but before I reformatted the D: partition always showed up as having the same capacity as the C:, that is, 36.2GB.
I just went into Acer eManager however and it pretty much agrees with you. Hard disk size, 74.53GB. Also confirmed by the label on the computer's carton: 80GB.
Given that those 18GB were never really there, is it possible to repartition the EISA to give me a few more GB for D?

 

Well, if there is free space on it, sure. But I cannot tell you what the risks would be; whether the recovery partition would function as such anymore.

If you are still interested in pursuing this, there are several solutions, the most common being Partition Magic.

I use gparted, but am unsure how well it resizes exisiting partitions without destroying data.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/GParted_d5757.html

 

Thinking back, I think what you saw prior was a space reporting error. This happens when there is damage to the filesystem, in which case, you converting it to NTFS or reformatting it again would have caused a chkdsk to run, and corrected the error.

 

Hmmm, I noticed my calculator was not consistent with rounding and made rounding errors....

Oh well, it served to make a point.

 

Thanks again. I may just settle for a larger HDD when I need one - probably not for some time yet - if fiddling with the recovery partition is problematic.
Your help was most appreciated.