hi i bought a new 80 gb hard drive created a new partitin set it formated it and made it use 100% of the disc space but it is a 80gb hard drive and now in my windows XP it says that it is 76.3. This is almost a 4 gb loss and i need that. did i do sumthing wrong can someone help me?

hi my geforce 2 have a weird tv it the screen has grey bars going up and down on it. they wont go away on te tv out but there is no problem with my monitor. i upgraded latest driver. anyone have any p

You did nothing wrong!

1. The RAW-Unformatted capacity of your drive "might" be rated to 80GB which will be less than that after formatting.

2. The formatted capacity "might" be rated for 1000 bytes per KB and normal readings within your operating system shows 1024-Bytes per KB / Not 1000-Bytes per KB

3. A combination of the above??

Using #2 as an example;
80GB will read as aprox. 78GB

Using #1 or #3 as an example, you might be getting 76.3GB

Or, There may be other examples not listed here!

808

808 is right. All hard drive manufacturers rate their drives this way. I have a 80GB Maxtor that shows up in Windows as 76.3GB. There is nothing lost.

Maxtor, WDC and Seagate even admit this:

From Maxtor web site
Reduced hard drive capacity reported after installing the operating sytem
http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=
IYOFcw8h&p_lva=&p_faqid=546&p_created=975528237&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlkc29
ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTk1JnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9R0ImcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT0zJnBfcHJvZF9
sdmwxPX5hbnl_JnBfcHJvZF9sdmwyPX5hbnl_JnBfY2F0X2x2bDE9fmFueX4mcF9jYXRfbHZsMj1
_YW55fiZwX3BhZ2U9NA**&p_li=

From Western Digital web site
Why is my drive displaying a smaller than expected capacity in Windows or Mac?
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=
615&p_created=1034613413&p_sid=pqhodw8h&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPSZwX3NvcnRf
Ynk9JnBfZ3JpZHNvcnQ9JnBfcm93X2NudD0zNSZwX2NhdF9sdmwxPTE4NCZwX3BhZ2U9MQ**&p_li=

From Seagate web site
Storage Capacity Measurement Standards
http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tb/capacity_measure.html

Hi
The above should explain it all:

Anyhow a quick rundown::

80 000 000 000 bytes is ? in Gigabytes in the binary sense (its been suggested we should use the term Gigibytes [Gi] to express the difference in terminology). The answer is divide with (1024 x 1024x 1024) and you arrive at approx 74.5 GB.

I would be guessing, but consider 808's good remarks and guess that you have a 80G drive formatted (more unformatted) and about 4G is used for storing format restore info or whatever other info XP needs to keep away from main access.