My laptop says it has 80gb but it is only 32 on 2 hard drives, is somthing wrong?

Question

I recently bought an Acer Aspire 5315 it says it has 80gb HDD but when i open up the computer page it says there are 2 hard drives that are 32gb each, that is not 80. I have Vista if that helps

Answer 1

Not sure about Acer but I know some manufacturers like Dell, steal a bit of the hard drive which the laptop keeps in a hidden partition (used for diagnostic and system restore). This could be costing you several gigs.

Also 80 GB is the theoretical size of the drive but you always will lose a few gigs after its formatted and everything is all said and done. for an 80GB the actual storage capacity can be as low as 73GB.

Very odd the the hard drive is partitioned in half though.

Answer 2

Sounds like the 80 GB HDD was partitioned into 2 x 32 Gb chunks leaving you 16 Gb unaccounted for. I could see partitioning leaving out maybe a track or two, but 16 Gb is NOT a track or two. If this is a recent purchase, you should have some warranty rights. Like a call to the (local) seller or to the Acer customer support team.

To help you get a better handle on things, try clicking the start button and by clicking, follow this path:

Start >> Accessories >> System Tools >> System Information

The System Information dialog box is a "tree" view of your computer. Find the "Components" branch, which should have a plus-sign to expand it. Click that. You should now see a list of categories including "Storage" - again with a plus. Click that, too. You should now see a list that includes both "Drives" and "Disks" - and here is where you can account for everything.

On DISKS, you can see the "true" hard drive and its partitions. The capacity of the hard drive will be given twice, once in Gb and once with the bytes spelled out. They won't match because Microsoft uses the binary version of GB in which 1 Gb = 1 KB x 1 KB x 1 KB and 1 KB = 1024 bytes (NOT 1000). On my main hard drive, this results in seeing something like 149.05 GB = 160 billion and change. But I would doubt seriously that the 80 GB would reduce to 64 billion bytes because of this. I could see maybe 74 GB total.

If I understand it correctly, your overhead for a partition should be about 32 KB. Way less than the discrepancy you are seeing.

On DRIVES, you can see the "logical" disk drives that are the partitions without considering the physical disks. It is these drives that have drive letters. These numbers should match up with the partititions shown on the DISKS page.

Check your manuals to be sure there isn't a "shadow" drive somewhere that holds your Windows release kit in reserve so you can do a refresh of everything. That might have some effect on your storage. But on my system, that drive (1) is mounted and therefore visible and (2) only takes up about 5 GB. You STILL would seem to be missing 10 GB - and I would be surprised if such a partition existed that you could not see.

UNLESS... they formatted your 80 GB hard drive into two FAT16 volumes or FAT32 volumes, which have size limits. On a modern Windows box, they should have used NTFS formatting. No question, they should have done it that way. But the real question is Did they? (The system information page tells you that, too.)

Answer 3

The HDD format takes a few GB from the total amount and if you have vista it takes around 10-12 GB including all the drivers and software's installed. So if you the math 32+32+12 it will be around 74 or 78 GB just with the OS.

Answer 4

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