Thinkpads Forum

i just replaced my 100gb 7200 rpm hard drive with wd black scorpio 320gb 7200 rpm drive. i used Acronis & worked fine by cloneing the hard drive.but it says now 282gb in my computer?Actually It said 298gb before cloning started,not 320gb?i Have Xp professional 32.Is it cause it cant read the rest?how can i recover the missing gb's?Is there a way to check the hard drive if its actally 320gb?

That's because a gigabyte doesn't equal 1024 megabytes, and a megabyte doesn't equal 1024 kilobytes, and a kilobyte doesn't equal 1024 bytes.

A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, a megabyte is 1000 kilobytes, and a kilobyte is 1000 bytes.

However, a gibibyte (short for giga-binary, abbreviated GiB) is 1024 mebibytes (abbreviated MiB,) a mebibyte is 1024 kibibytes (kiB,) and a kibibyte is 1024 bytes.

320 GB = about 298 GiB.

But, Windows still says GB, even though it means GiB. Hence the confusion.

Now, as for why you've only got 282 GiB total... look at your partition table. My guess is that the restore partition isn't all the way to the end, or something like that, and/or the main partition isn't as big as it could be. Be careful, you can destroy your data messing around with the partition table. IIRC, you should have about 290-294 GiB or so.

ok,i hear what you are saying.thanks.let me give you play by play.I opened up acronis 2009,i have new 320gb hard drive hooked up usb,it shows the 320gb as 298.1 size,not 320gb?Maybe its not a true 320gb?now if i copy the old hard drive it would show a summary now of 282.5gb ntfs with 15.64gb for Fat32(service001) it shows used for fat32 4.15gb & 11.5gb free for the service?Do i really need all that gb space in the service?can i just put that 11gb back into the primary 282.5gb instead?if anyone can help me who has done this before.i am new to this stuff.thanks.Sorry if i sound like a rookie.

Your drive is a 320gb drive, see what the above poster said. You might be able to recover a few gb's from the service partition, but its probably not worth it for ~11.5gb.

OK, the service partition is bigger than I thought. Just leave it alone. Think of it this way - that space would've been taken up on your old drive, too.

Your drive is a true 320 GB, but that's only 298.1 GiB. Since Windows and many programs still use the incorrect prefixes, it'll say "298.1 GB."

I've finally decided to trash and merge the service partition on my drives. I never used it and since I use cloned hard drives for regular backups, I wouldn't ever want to restore to factory defaults anyway. In fact after using W7 rc for a while, there's no way I'm going back to Vista (unless forced to for some reason). If I ever need to restore to factory defaults, say to sell the machine or something, I have the restore disks for that.

OT for a moment: I can't believe how well my T61p is finally running now that it has a clean install of W7rc plus the very minimum Lenovo utilities and drivers needed, most of which were installed automatically by Windows update. Really if you haven't tried this OS, you are really missing out. Even as a "release candidate" it is 1000's of times more stable, much faster, and better in every way than Vista or XP. It's fully suitable for mission critical work, imo.

What I have done to sort of "replace" the service partition is simply to install and activate a small 350 mb Acronis Secure Zone partition. I can boot into this to do fast easy and reliable clones to a second hard drive in the Ultra Bay, and possibly also a partition on an USB external drive (haven't actually tried that one yet) but it is supposed to be possible. It's kind of nice to have ATIH on the drive in its own secure bootable partition.