[Crapattack749]

I built a computer for a friend. Made it cheap and got a 40 gig HD. When I installed XP it only read it as 32 Gigs. I know of swap space but 8 Gigs is a bit much. Can I get any back?

 

[steveo42024]

[They might have rounded up. I bought a 160 gb maxtor and it reads 152. Weak

 

[ShawnMcGrail]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Crapattack749 I built a computer for a friend. Made it cheap and got a 40 gig HD. When I installed XP it only read it as 32 Gigs. I know of swap space but 8 Gigs is a bit much. Can I get any back?

Absolutly not, the hard drives are built to push something around 20% off to the side for the swap, or MBR or something like that.. don't remember now.. lol

 

[steveo42024]

Good call

 

[SpookedJunglist]

my 80 gig hard drive reads as a little less but thats because of marketing...
advertisers think that 1000mb is one gigabyte
computer guys know that 1024mb is one gigabyte

i would recomend trying to reinstall windows from scratch from boot.....

and when it asks you where to install windows select delete partition
and delete any partitions on that drive and then create your partition
and use all available space, it should be around 38gigs

also its a good idea to set it as two partitions of 20gigs if thats your only drive
because if you have to reinstall windows in the future you can back up everything on the other partition

8 gigs is too much missing space
MBR is master boot record and is very small not even a gig..

What are you using to tell you how big your HD is??

 

[ShawnMcGrail]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spookedjunglist my 80 gig hard drive reads as a little less but thats because of marketing... advertisers think that 1000mb is one gigabyte computer guys know that 1024mb is one gigabyte i would recomend trying to reinstall windows from scratch from boot..... and when it asks you where to install windows select delete partition and delete any partitions on that drive and then create your partition and use all available space, it should be around 38gigs also its a good idea to set it as two partitions of 20gigs if thats your only drive because if you have to reinstall windows in the future you can back up everything on the other partition 8 gigs is too much missing space MBR is master boot record and is very small not even a gig.. What are you using to tell you how big your HD is??

Well, its something along those lines.. I think it was a post on here a while ago.. Theres 20% of your drive used for making an image of all the files on the disk.

 

[Veto1024]

Windows should read at the very least 37.2 gigs. You do have some space missing and the boot records and swap files do not make up for that. The boot record is very small and the SWAP file, contrary to what some people say, will show up as a file on your computer. Ive seen it and done the calculations and with what windows reports and what hard drives actually have in terms of advertised and real GB, the SWAP file is accounted for in the GB report windows gives you as an actual file.

 

[blob]

Try Norton DriveSpace and see if your partition uses the WHOLE hard drive.

 

[tom7723]

hard drives are really cheap nowadays...first try to get an exchange if it's only 32GB...You can always get more hd's later, faster and bigger

 

[Stevo3]

give this a read and see if it helps

http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/m...cGFnZT0x&p_li=

I think that the most probable cause is the 32gb partition limit that fat32 and windows xp has. try formatting in ntfs and this will not happen.

please rep if this helped