Thinkpads Forum

o.k. what did I do wrong and how do I fix it?

having both a backup and an image of HD I figured the time had come to a) get back the 5G from the recovery partition and b) create a secured documents partition

used Partition Magic... a) deleted the old hidden partition then b) created a new partition ... so primary partition is 81.1G the second logical partition is 14.3 ... totaling 95.4G ... hmmm where is the rest?

when I deleted the hidden recovery partition ... do I not automatically regain that space? I was trying to get that space allocated to the new partition... or did I have to formate the whole drive?

o.k. what did I do wrong and how do I fix it?

thanks

steve

hi steve,

thing is that you'll never gonna see that you have 100gb available! its the parity that 1mbyte is 1.bla bla bla mbite

for example on my 40gb hdd i can in fact use 37.26 gb...

give a right lick on the partition and you'll see "capacity" in mbytes and next to how much you can use

dorin

hmmmm

I wish I had written down the numbers before I had done this because I am sure that before the HD was a lot closer to 100G ... but then maybe I am mistaken ...

hmm i guess I will not worry about it then, after all in the end I have space... it is just I like to understand where it went ... after all that is why i deleted the recovery partition ... but I guess you are saying that if had not i would have 5G less than I do now ...

thanks

Cassirer wrote:hmmmm

I wish I had written down the numbers before I had done this because I am sure that before the HD was a lot closer to 100G ... but then maybe I am mistaken ...

hmm i guess I will not worry about it then, after all in the end I have space... it is just I like to understand where it went ... after all that is why i deleted the recovery partition ... but I guess you are saying that if had not i would have 5G less than I do now ...

thanks

Cassirer, I remember reading some where that when a hard drive is formatted for NTFS file system (which is used un Win XP) you lose approximately 5% of the total capacity. windows 98 and other older operating systems which use FAT32 file systems take up more than 15% of the total capacity. So, whatever OS ou use, you will never get to use 100% capacity of your HDD

ah yes ... now i see ... when I converted the new partition to NTFS it did tell me how much space was needed to do the conversion ... but I thought that was temporary ... again such is life ... now I know

thanks

It's not because you lose space on your hardrive, it's because harddrive manufactor uses 10 as a base, while most filesystems use 2 as a base.

example:

Harddrive manufactors says 100GB which means 100,000,000,000 byte

that translatets to 93,13GB in the filesystem where 1GB is 1024^3

read more about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harddisk in the section "Marketing" capacity versus true capacity

Actually, I recall seeing something in the Thinkpad BIOS which says something like 'make hidden pre-desktop area (recovery area) available to Operating System' under configuration? Maybe this is what you need to enable?