ok i normally try to ANSWER questions not ASK them, but i wondering, does anyone know why windows only sees 37.2 GB of my 40 GB hard drive? It hapens with all versions of windows. And if someone knows why, then could you tell me how to fix it?

[UberLord]

Originally posted by generalstupid
ok i normally try to ANSWER questions not ASK them, but i wondering, does anyone know why windows only sees 37.2 GB of my 40 GB hard drive? It hapens with all versions of windows. And if someone knows why, then could you tell me how to fix it?

Sure

When you format a drive it basically puts a structure on the disk which stores stuff like the files name, size, where it starts and where it ends (plus loads more stuff for NTFS formats). This structure takes up space.

It also stores stuff which tells the drive how it's paritioned.

There's more stuff involved as well, but the key point is that all this takes up space.

Your drive is 40GB unformatted and 37GB formatted. So there's nothing to fix

[digitalwanderer]

...most hard-drives are actually about 20% bigger than their stated rating and the extra space is used to replace bad areas on the disk? (I thought I read an article on it once long ago...)

[UberLord]

Originally posted by digitalwanderer
...most hard-drives are actually about 20% bigger than their stated rating and the extra space is used to replace bad areas on the disk? (I thought I read an article on it once long ago...)

Never heard that one before