JR, Please re-read the original message and my reply. I think you might be a little off from what was originally stated and what my reply was.
Glen ----- Original Message ----- From: "John R. Bayle" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 6:46 PM Subject: Re: [LegacyUG] Allocation of computer drives Gail wrote: >I have a 120GB new hard drive. My C:\ drive shows 14.9GB and my D:\ drive >shows 96.8GB. Now I know this adds to 111.7GB and that leaves 8.3GB >unaccounted for. I do have a floppy disk drive, a memory stick drive, and 2 >DVD drives that appear to be for removable media only. I'm not sure where >the rest of the space went. However, my main question is why is only 14.9GB >allocated to C:\ and can/should this be changed? > I believe Glen has already replied and said that some data is lost to formatting. However, I have a problem with Glen's explanation. That is that I belive there's a law that manufacturers must advertise the formatted capacity of the drive as the actual capacity of the drive. They may state the unformatted capacity for those doing their own low level formatting, but the prominently displayed capacity must be with the standard formatting. There is another source of loss, which I think offers a better explanation. Different units. When the drives are sold the manufacturers count a Gigabyte as 10^9 = 1,000,000,000 bytes. However, most computer operating systems, Windoze included, count Gigabytes as 2^30 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. You can see this for yourself by just looking at the disk's properties in Windoze Explorer. 1) Open an Explorer window. 2) Click on the little plus sign next to "My Computer" 3) Now right click once on the icon of the disk you want to look at. That brings up a pop-up menu. At the bottom is a properties item 4) Click on the properties item at the bottom of the pop up. You should now be looking at a dialog box showing some properties of the disk There is a large "pie" in the middle showing the total size of the disk, the amount of space used and the amount of space free. Note there are two numbers for each of these sizes. For example I have a "40 GB" external (USB) hard drive. Going through the above procedure, it shows the drive has a total capacity of 40,039,055,360 bytes. It also says the drive is 37.2 GB large. If you divide 40 by 1.0737 you get 37.25. Funny how that works! ;-) If you divide 120 by 1.0737, you get 111.76 and change. Oh, this new 120 GB drive is a new internal drive? or is it external? Now I'm also curious about something else that Glen wrote. He wrote: >You can add 20 to 40 GB to C:\ and this will decrease D:\ by this much. You can only do this on a single physical disk right? The symantec website seems to state that the product allows one to partition a single disk into different partitions. I ask, because some of what's been written on this very interesting topic implies that one can "repartition" space from one physical disk to another. This kind of "drive remapping" is commonly done by various Raid Controllers, but as far as I know, this level of "disk virutalization" is not done by Partition Magic. jr Legacy User Group Etiquette guidelines can be found at: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp To find past messages, please go to our searchable archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup%40mail.millenniacorp.com/ To unsubscribe please visit: http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/LegacyLists.asp Legacy User Group Etiquette guidelines can be found at: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp To find past messages, please go to our searchable archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup%40mail.millenniacorp.com/ To unsubscribe please visit: http://www.legacyfamilytree.com/LegacyLists.asp
