Hard drive space...missing?

I have several desktop hard drives that aren't what they are supposed
to be.
My 80G is 67ish, 40G is 36ish, my 20G is 16ish.
I wanted a clean install of the OS on my 20G tonight, and after
deleting and creating the partition, it lost about 1G in front of my
eyes. It started at 17+ (before deleting the partition) and ended up
as a formatted 16+.

Is there a way to recover the lost space? I kept the same format
(NTFS) and it seems to me that it should have ended up the same size.

joester wrote:
>
> I have several desktop hard drives that aren't what they are
> supposed to be. My 80G is 67ish, 40G is 36ish, my 20G is 16ish.
> I wanted a clean install of the OS on my 20G tonight, and after
> deleting and creating the partition, it lost about 1G in front of
> my eyes. It started at 17+ (before deleting the partition) and
> ended up as a formatted 16+.
>
> Is there a way to recover the lost space? I kept the same format
> (NTFS) and it seems to me that it should have ended up the same size.

All drives assign space for a boot sector, and then space to
control the actual space assignments. For FAT that includes the
actual FATS (usually 2) and the root directory. For other file
systems there are different needs. ext2 has to assign inodes.
NTFS is unknown, because MS refuses to publish a specification.
This is just one more reason to avoid MS.

--
Chuck F (cbfalconer at maineline dot net)
Available for consulting/temporary embedded and systems.
<http://cbfalconer.home.att.net>

"joester" <no@spam.invalid> wrote in message
news:12ncjddsggnmof3@news.supernews.com...
>I have several desktop hard drives that aren't what they are supposed
> to be.
> My 80G is 67ish, 40G is 36ish, my 20G is 16ish.
> I wanted a clean install of the OS on my 20G tonight, and after
> deleting and creating the partition, it lost about 1G in front of my
> eyes. It started at 17+ (before deleting the partition) and ended up
> as a formatted 16+.
>
> Is there a way to recover the lost space? I kept the same format
> (NTFS) and it seems to me that it should have ended up the same size.

Use the drive utility provided at the manufacturers website to Zero out the
drive. That way there can be no odd stuff affecting the size. Next, go into
the BIOS settings and detect the drive (or configure to match the sector
count, etc.) Finally, create a single, primary partition on the drive and
format it.

Remember that the manufacturers count in base 10, so 20gig is
20,000,000,000. To a computer, 20,000,000,000 is only 18.63gig. Then you
have to use some of that for formatting, partition tables, etc.

joester <no@spam.invalid> wrote:

> I have several desktop hard drives that aren't what they are supposed to be.

> My 80G is 67ish, 40G is 36ish, my 20G is 16ish.

Some of that is due to the fact that the hard drive manufacturers
quote the size in decimal GBs, 1,000,000,000 bytes and some
of the reports within the OS use binary GBs, 1024^3 bytes.

> I wanted a clean install of the OS on my 20G tonight, and after deleting
> and creating the partition, it lost about 1G in front of my eyes. It started
> at 17+ (before deleting the partition) and ended up as a formatted 16+.

> Is there a way to recover the lost space?

Depends on how you managed to lose it.

What did you do that with and what is reporting the sizes ?

> I kept the same format (NTFS) and it seems to
> me that it should have ended up the same size.

joester wrote:

> I have several desktop hard drives that aren't what they are supposed
> to be.
> My 80G is 67ish, 40G is 36ish, my 20G is 16ish.
> I wanted a clean install of the OS on my 20G tonight, and after
> deleting and creating the partition, it lost about 1G in front of my
> eyes. It started at 17+ (before deleting the partition) and ended up
> as a formatted 16+.
>
> Is there a way to recover the lost space? I kept the same format
> (NTFS) and it seems to me that it should have ended up the same size.

Last time I looked at an ntfs drive on a non-ntfs system, there was a
file well over a gig that was fully hidden by w2k, and not found on 2k
FAT drives. What it is I'm not sure, but it looks like ntfs stores a
huge amount of data under its covers. So switching to fat32, which you
can happily do with a 20G drive, might get you some of that space back.


NT