Lost 50GB on a 750GB drive after Format….

[cyclone3211]

Lost 50GB on a 750GB drive after Format….What happen to the rest of my hard drive?……
Hardware WD My Home 750 GB on a Dell 8400
Version of XP Media Center Edition Ver 2002 SP2

Installed new external drive and changed format to NTFS and now have 698.63 GB; nothing else on the drive. I expected to lose some space to overhead but not 50GBs.

Is this normal?

If not, how to a get some of that 50GB back?

[cyclone3211]

Thank you for your fast reply.

That was the answer....but that led me to ask "how come?"

Once I knew the direction WDC gave the exact measurement and "all was not lost".

Windows uses a "Binary" measurement and considers a Gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes. So 1073741824*698.63= 750.15GB; it seems that the Hard drive manufacturers use a "Decimal" measurement, which considers a Gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes.

Problem resolved.

[snowmonkey]

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

Thus a disk specified by a disk manufacturer as a 30 GB disk might have its capacity reported by Windows 2000 both as "30,065,098,568 bytes" and "28.0 GB". The disk manufacturer used the SI definition of "giga", 109 to arrive at 30 GB; however, because the utilities provided by Windows, Mac and some Linux distributions define a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes (230 bytes, often referred to as a gibibyte, or GiB), the operating system reports capacity of the disk drive as (only) 28.0 GB.


Also, Windows operating system save or reserve 10 of the hard drive space for recycle bin as well as small section for power management like hibernation.

Cheers

[septia]

Originally Posted by haveabeer

Where do you get your reading ?
HD size is based on 1 GB being a 1000 mb,when it really is 1012.
Do your math.

i think it must be 1024 not 1012...
am i correct???

[seacat88]

i have a question about this too...
I know 698GB is no problem, but when i check the properties of the external HDD, i found that there is a used space of 89MB,how come this happen? even after i format, it still the same, but at least better than before i format it as it show 1GB used space the 1st time i plug in to my computer.
Anyhow, is this because of the HDD got bad sector?