hd says 16 gb but it's a 20 gb.

I just did a clean install and on my primary drive it states that it is a 16.7 gb avaliable space total hd. I know it's a 20. I installed win xp sp 2 before everything else and wonder if this is normal or not. I got a gateway, this one's an older model 500 MHz, over 300 memory, pentium III pc. I hope I don't have to reinstall everything again but if I got to,... $*@(. Please help!

 

Right-click My Computer and select manage. Highlight disk Management in the left hand pane. This will list your hard drives and display how you they are assigned. Post back and let us know what you find out. (or post a screenshot)

 

Halo seems to be correct.

 

Hard drive manufacturers treat 1 GB as 1000 MB. (Decimal)

Windows treats 1 GB as 1024 MB, (Binary) so you will always have a discrepancy.

 

volume: c
layout: partition
type: basic
file system: ntfs
status: health (system)
capacity: 16.79 Gb
free space: 12.29 gb
% free: 73%
fault tolerance:no
overhead: 0%




bottom section states:

disk 0 basic 16.79 Gb online

disk 1 unknown 37.27 GB not initalized
cd rom 0
cd rom 1
------------------------------------------------------

Side Question: I got a western digital hd as disk 1. I tried to install using software disk and I get error message that says fat not identified in c drive so i must put fat 16 and can partition rest as fat or ntfs.
Is this a must, or do I just install through MY Computer --> Manage --> disk management --> and use wizard to make it ntfs (as stated it says drive1 or this hd is not initialized)?

BY the way I think halo is right cause it also says the second drive will only have around 37 gb total space on a 40 Gb hd. Thanks u all for the aid in that first concern.

 

Being as rusty as I am with Windows, you should be able to open Disk Management and right click that hard drive. It should have something like initialize disk in the list. Once you do that, you should be able to format normally.