Best way to partition drive?

[Digerati]

I have a western digital WD800JB 80gb and I am going to set it up as my primary master drive.

Using Partition Magic 8, I set up 5gb as a partition for windows XP pro.

As of right now, I just made the remaining 75 gb into one big partition that I probably will divide again later.

My question is, when I look under windows at my overall drive space. I says I have about 75gb of space.

Where did that other 5gb go?

I realize that you're never going have exactly 80gb available to use in an 80gb drive. But 5gb seems like alot to lose. Is there some way I can make better use of the space I have so as to make more if it available?

Thanks!

 

[PeterGee1]

hmmm

I do think that's exactly the case. I have a new Maxtor 80GB (installed five minutes ago) and PM8 says I got 78 160MB.

78 160 / 1024 = 76,32 GB so you would 'lose' almost 4 GB. Agreed, it's still not 5GB, but it's all I can think of

Peter

 

[RagnaroK]

Originally posted by Digerati
My question is, when I look under windows at my overall drive space. I says I have about 75gb of space.

Where did that other 5gb go?

I realize that you're never going have exactly 80gb available to use in an 80gb drive. But 5gb seems like alot to lose.

To answer that question (which never gets old), harddrive manufacturers make their harddrives so that 1 gigabyte is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes. While Windows registers 1 gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes.

So if you take 80 gigabytes (80,000,000,000 bytes) divide that with 1,073,741,824 bytes, you get abot 74.5 gigabytes left (thanks to yoyo for teaching me that! ). Hope that helped!

RaG

 

[PeterGee1]

what ragnarok said

Why can't explain it like that??