space left during partition?

Question

during xp installation,,when I make partition of my HDD ...8MB is alwayas left unuseable,,,,,i cant make full use of my HDD space.......Why.......

Answer 1

forget about 8 mb. boot sector need some space in your HDD

Answer 2

If you create FAT or FAT32 partitions then there would always be some space left unused on your disk whatever size it may be because the Partitioning software uses 1024 bytes as 1KB so if you are going to create a 8GB partion it is actually 8*1024MB however the disk capacity as marked by manufacturerers doesn't follow this convention. They mark 1000bytes as 1KB. In actual terms you do not get the actual amount of space as per theoritical calculations. However this note is always mentioned on the drive sticker so even if you buy 80GB disk you get something around 74 or 73GB to use and that too only if you are using NTFS file system. In case of NTFS file system you wouldn't face this issue if you bulid your partitions by specifying the exact space in MB while creating your partitions. However if you specify the percentage then you leave it on the logic of the partiotiong utility which rounds it off to nearest MB leaving the decimal part that means if you had 10GB disk and you specified 47% as the space to be used to create the partition which should create a 4812.8 MB partiton as expected however it would create a partition of 4812 MB or less. Incase of FAT or FAT32 partitons its rounded off to a multiple of 1024 so you are always left with some amount of space unused while creating the partitions.

My advice use NTFS and specify the partion size in MBs instead of % to use the maximum capcaity available from your Hard disk drive.

Answer 3

this is a really good question....one of the few im having trouble answering. All i know is that some small percentage of ur HDD space is reserved for some reasons...i think its cuz it is required when ur computer is starting up or running...cuz if ur HDD is 100% used up, it will be impossible to load and run ur system efficiently...Thats the best i got for ya. Cheers!

Answer 4

some times it happens when this much portion of HDD would have been created as a drive by NTFS format, then it is not shown. even u will not see this much portion while creating partition by using win98 bootable. it will be seen by magicpartition and u can utilise this much portion by using this cd or it may be Linux

Answer 5

It's quite natural !!!
Bootable files do take some space.
More over full access of hdd is not possible !!!

Answer 6

some space is kept by the system and the partion manager , that is why.