I have a 40 gig drive which was previously used and partitioned into two drives. My problem is that when you look at the capacity of the two drives in Disk Management, it only adds up to 34 gigs. I ran FDISK and it also said that the partitions only added up to 34 gigs. I ran PC Doctor and it passed all tests, so it's not like there are damaged sectors. I tried quick and long formats in both NTFS and FAT32. I'm at a loss as to explain the missing 6 gigs or get them back as useable.
2007-06-20 07:27:07 · 6 answers · asked by Carolyn R 3 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Other - Hardware
More info -- for those of you who told me that it is recoverable or it actually is somewhere, but perhaps not in teh partitions -- please tell me exactly how to get the repartitioning done / formatted correctly so that I can get those 6 gigs back.
In FDISK it shows that total disk space is 34 gigs, even if I delete the extended DOS partition
2007-06-20 08:18:10 · update #1
Actually while partitioning, there are some sector information to be stored somewhere. OS uses hardisk itself for that. Basically when you have hard disk, OS divides full spaces in to sectors and it creates links of sectors (tracks). Now information of each sectors (how many bytes this sector has, what is maximum size of sector, where is next sector etc) are also stored under HD and those are not calculated on final counting when you see size of HD.
If you go OS to OS (Like Win to Linux), physical 40 gig HD will allow different storage depending upon which format it uses.
Other than that, if you have WinXP installed in your machine, it also stores some recovery items in HD, which is not calculated as net HD size. So, if you sumup everything, I believe 6 gig will disappear!! There is nothing wrong.
2007-06-20 07:56:43 · answer #1 · answered by Alay S 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
First off a 40 GB hard drive is only 39.06 GB manufactures use 1000mb for a GB where as Windows is 1024mb /GB so that would account for 1 GB leaving you with 4GB unaccounted for .the manufacturers screw you bad for example mine is supposed to be 160 GB but windows only shows 149 a differnce of 11 GB . Does disk manager show any non allocated space? if so extend one of the partitions using the unallocated space. If the hard dirve has bad sectors on it when it is formatted these sectors will be skipped causing a loss of space in which case you can try to reformat the entire drive again as a single partition and splitting them. Also are they both formatted in the same format (NTFS or FAT) the two different formats may vary capacity as NTFS offers better compression. The best way to tell if your problem is related to your OS or your hard drive is to open your BIOS and check there to see what the total hard drive space is as the BIOS will detect the drive as a whole and not seperate partitions. If BIOS only detects 34GB then I would suggest replacing the hard drive. Good luck
2007-06-28 10:44:33 · answer #2 · answered by twopappa 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You probably have the missing gigs in some extended partition. Use dos debug, the specific procedure is on microsoft web site. It will delete all existing partitions. Better yet, get a linuxlivecd and run qtparted/cfdisk/gparted.
2007-06-20 15:36:01 · answer #3 · answered by Jeuteau 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The other 6 gigs were not incorporated into either of the partitions, so you have 6 gigs of hard drive (probably not fromatted), that isn't being used.
2007-06-20 14:37:32 · answer #4 · answered by Ron M 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
The drive isn't really 40GB even though thats what it is rated for. Manufacturers use a base 10 system for advertising, but the storage is actually in base 2, so instead of 1000MB per GB, its actually 1024. This difference accounts for several GB 'missing' from drives.
2007-06-20 14:38:33 · answer #5 · answered by therealchuckbales 5 · 2⤊ 0⤋
I've had this happen twice and each time it signaled that I was about to have to go out and buy another HDD.
2007-06-20 14:36:33 · answer #6 · answered by jhurst747 3 · 0⤊ 0⤋