I have a 20 gig HD that Windows shows as 17 gigs. In My Computer it shows as: Capacity--17GB; Used--704MB; Free--16.3GB. Here's what's showing up in FDISK/STATUS, and it's got me confused. What is it saying? Where are my missing 3GB? Thanks for an explanation: Fixed Disk Drive Status Disk Drv Mbytes Free Usage 1 19469 2000 90% C: 17469

Looks like my format changed in the upload somehow- I'll try again: Disk Drv MBytes Free Usage 1 19469 2000 90% C: 17469

Disk Drv MBytes Free Usage 1 19469 2000 90% C: 17469

Go to Start/Run and type: fdisk /status

The extra space is sitting on your hard drive - As you can see, the partition is only 90% of the availably space (the Usage Column indicates the size allocated to the partition)...

The c: partition on the hard drive is 90% of the total rather than 100%. That accounts for part of it. The rest of it is due to the misunderstanding between billions of bytes and gigabytes. A 20 gig drive has approximately 20 billion bytes. But a gigabyte is actually 1024 x 1024 x 1024 or about 1,074,000,000 bytes. If a 20 gig drive was described that way it would be 20/(1.024 x 1.024 x 1.024) or about 18.6 gig. It's partitioned at 90% or 16.8 gig. Of that about .7 gig is used which leaves about 16.1 gig left. The difference between 16.1 and your figure of 16.3 is due to a 20 gig drive not being exactly 20 billion bytes. The figures in My Computer were based on the 1024 definition while fdisk was reporting total bytes. That's why they're different. You can either partition the remaining 10 percent as a separate drive or run fdisk, remove the partition and repartition it as 100% (and reinstall your OS) or you can spend a lot of money on something like Partition Magic and merge the 2 spaces into a single partition.

Thanks, Ellis. It's not like I need the space, but I guess what you're saying is that 10% of my HD is not available for use?