120gig HDD only getting 111Gigs :\

[Mr.Bungle]

I have a 120gig seagate HDD, btu when I try and do a fresh install of xp on it i can only make a partition of 111gigs. The same thing with fdisk. I ran this program called killdisk and it showed it on a seperate partition that I cannot access for some reason. Can anyone help me get my full drive capacity.

 

[Triple6]

Actually thats about right on. There's a little false advertising going on with HDD manufacturers. They use 1000 bytes to represent 1 Kilobyte when its really 1024 bits in 1 kilobyte but everyone else doesn't so there's a desrepency in the stated and useable size af all drives.

Here's a Link: http://personal-computer-tutor.com/abc3/v30/vic30.htm

 

[LONGHAIR]

That's all you are going to get. Part of the drive is used in the formatting process. Part of it was never there in the first place. The factories over-state the actual capacity by calling a MB 1,000,000 bytes, when actually a MB is 1,048,576 bytes.

 

[Ash_11]

Here is information on why XP is reporting the drive as less than what you
are expecting.

Several factors may come into play when you see the reported capacity of a
disk drive. Unfortunately, there are two different number systems which are
used to express units of storage capacity:

1) binary, which defines a kilobyte as equal to 1024 bytes, and
2) decimal, which defines a kilobyte as equal to 1000 bytes. The storage
industry standard is to display drive capacity in decimal format. Even
though in binary you have more bytes, the binary representation of a GB
demonstrates greater capacity.

Name Binary Decimal

Kilobyte = KB 1,024 1,000
Megabyte = MB 1,048,576 1,000,000
Gigabyte = GB 1,073,741,824 1,000,000,000


To verify that your drive is being seen in its full capacity, go into My
Computer, right click on the drive, go to properties and view the number of
bytes. As an example:

Capacity: 40,006,123,520 bytes 37.2 GB

In this example - the capacity is 40GB drive using decimal mathematics
(dividing the number of bytes by 1,000,000,000). However, using binary
mathematics, the capacity is 37.2 GB.