HDD space

i recently bought a 320gb HDD of ebay. its a used HDD but in excellent condition. the previous owner already formatted it so for me it was simply plug&play. when i checked on the HDD, windows reported it had 298gb free space. thinking 'eh?' i decided to reformat to see if i can free up more space. it didnt. now i know with any memory u dont get the full capacity especially with HDDs. normally for me windows would take around 10gb off leaving the rest which is fine. but for the 320gb windows took 22gb.

surely windows doesnt need 22gb does it? any help with this?

 

Hard drives never give you the capacity on the box, it's always less.

 

i know that, but i want to know is - does windows need 22gb or has windows taken the wrong amount?

 

just because it says that the hdd is 320GB doesn't mean it's exactly 320GB. hdd's when they are created vary in size. 320GB is what they're trying to create but in reallity it could vary between 300GB to 320GB. hope this helps explain things a little better.

 

hy, this is my first post ...

I have same problem, i've got maxtor 250GB 16mb cache
when installing winXP I see only 138000MB ,where is other 112000MB ?!

this hapened whed did i 2nd time reinstaling win, i delete all partition & wish to created it in diferent sizes. but then says unpartitioned space 138122MB

first time was 244840MB, i'm sorry for bothering and my bad engilsh..but I don't wana lose 120GB for nothing...

help please..how to solve this problem?

 

@dnx read my post just above yours. it explains everything. btw welcome to Major Geeks!

 

i did, but you didn't read my..

it says that i see ONLY 130GB but hard drive have 250GB .... in 1st format it was 244GB (that is ok -as you explaine) ,but then I in "windows setup" delete all patritions ,one by one, when i deleted last ..was writen only - unpartitioned space 138122MB... i wounder if you could help me to get back my 120GB space... you are experts... must be that you have been had problem like that..tnx

 

http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/138451.html

here it is...

 

@ prankz

today I too installed a 320 GB HDD and after I formated it, I only have 298 GB of space. So I did some searching and found the answer at the manufacturer's web site. Here is the link.

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tb/capacity_measure.html