full amount of hdd not registering

[isaacual69]

just wondering...why is it that when you install a hdd say like an 80 gig drive, only say, 74 gigs show in windows? this has happened to all drives that i have installed in all the computers i have built..is there any way to get the entire drive to register its entire capacity?...thanks in advance for your help

 

[Motoxrdude]

just wondering...why is it that when you install a hdd say like an 80 gig drive, only say, 74 gigs show in windows? this has happened to all drives that i have installed in all the computers i have built..is there any way to get the entire drive to register its entire capacity?...thanks in advance for your help

Theres some equation for that, but thats normal. It has something to do with a gigibyte is 1,024 and not 1,000mbs.

 

[PC eye]

Booting from a 98 startup floppy and changing to a freshly formatted 80gb with no OS installed will usually show some 80,000,000,000+ number for available drive space. When in Windows a portion of the drive is taken up for partition information, master boot record, and with XP the restoration cab files along with the space used for the installation itself. The big difference there is how Windows reads drive space after creation and format of a single primary partition. Dos on the other hand uses only a few mb for the small amount of space used there plus is about as simplified as you can get.

 

[gamerman4]

When they give you a 80GB hard drive, its space is roughly 80,000,000,000 Bytes NOT 80 Gigabytes normally someone would convert bytes to each form (KB, MB, GB) by dividing by 1000 each which would be 80GB. True conversion is done by dividing by 1024. 80,000,000,000 divided by 1024 three times (from bytes to KB to MB to GB) it would be roughly 74GB.