Hi,

I have a 32-GB hard drive with one NTFS partition. The drive was originally FAT32 but I converted using W2K's "convert" feature.

Now, I know that when the manufacturer advertises 32 GB, it actually comes out to around 30 GB after you do the binary math.

Indeed, the Disk Management tool reports the size at 29.80 GB. However, My Computer reports the TOTAL volume capacity to be 28.3 GB.

Where did that 1.5 GB go? At first I thought it was file system overhead or space lost in formatting, but that wouldn't take up more than a gig, would it? I did some reading on the anatomy of the file system, and how it consumes a lot of space, but isn't that space WITHIN the volume, and therefore accounted for already as normal disk usage?

The truly strange thing is that I can chip off 1.5 GB from the C partition and create a small D partition. (I do this off of a floppy using a fairly primitive freeware partition manager I found on download.com.) Then when I then go look in My Computer, the original C partition is still 28.3 GB, and the 1.5 GB D partition is sitting next to it. The two total up to 29.8 GB, so there MUST be 30 full gigs of usable space in there. Why isn't that space available when it's all combined into one partition? I thought NTFS was supposed to be good at handling large volumes.

By the way, the aforementioned partition program reports the partition size to be a full 30 GB, with unused-space bubbles of negligible size; it's only My Computer that shows a lower number than expected.

Is My Computer reporting incorrectly, or is the space really unusable? Could there be geometry errors on the drive? ScanDisk says nothing is wrong. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks for reading this far through my rant.

-Patrick