Where did all of my memory go in my hard drive?

Question

I bought a 320 GB hard drive. Of course it never gives you that much so I have 298GB total... For some reason it says I have 244GB of space left...tI dont have anything but Windows Vista installed and Halo and some other stuff all rounding to about 20GB of space i used that i added up. then I should have 278GB laeft. What is going on, I want all my memory

Answer 1

Windows may have staked out a paging file.
I'm not that familiar with Vista, it is probably to blame.

Answer 2

There are many places that the space goes to. First, open up 'my computer'. See how many HDD's show up there, you may have a second partition ???. If not, then right click on the 'c' drive and click properties. There will be a page opens up w/ a pie chart for the HDD, and a listing of specific space/usage. The pie chart will show in approx values ( 298GB ) while above will show specifics. Here it should show ~320GB, if less there may be an unformatted partition there. If all shows up, then the extra space may be used by hidden files, or the "WASTE BASKET". Deleted files are still allotted for until they are deleted form the wastebasket...
If you have an unformatted partition, you can recover under the disk manager program. It will recover any partitions, but caution messing around in here, as you could lose the whole thing...
Since it says 'I bought a 320 GB hard drive' i would assume that this is and add-on, but if it came as the drive, there would also be a restore partition on the drive of approx. 6GB. It all adds up...
Hope this helps.

Answer 3

The reason you have reduced space is because Windows Vista lays down a recovery segment of the drive where it keeps a running mirror of important system data in the even of a non catastrophical failure. Drivers are also stored here that belong to VISTA only. However, this only accounts for about 100 megs. Plus recovery images about 2 gb.

I would wager and say that the drive has a misreporting filesystem and running SCANDISK, CHKDSK, and DEFRAG should correct it. If not, look for a hidden secondary partition containing full system recovery information for reinstalling Vista.

I am extremely sorry that you have Vista and you will be too but buck there sunshine, the 1st patch or service pack is due out next month. And then 8 months later the Patch that fixes the patch (Service Pack 2) will be out. Then Vista will be good.

Answer 4

First off 320GB hard drive is not 320 after it is formatted and software is loaded onto the drive. 320GB is a completely bare drive with no operating system or files installed on it.

Second, the hard drive is not memory, it is storage space.

Answer 5

you can't have everything you want in life.

some of the disk space----------not memory........is used by the program,.....some used by the computer when you set it up for use when you formatted it. windows ALWAYS sets-aside an amount of disk space----not memory-----for safety.

otherwise you'd crash the drive.