What's Taking Up All Hard Drive Room

[imaginos]

Hello all.

Quick question about hard drive space after a reinstall. Recently my 80 g hard drive crashed and IBM sent me a new one under warranty. It says 80 g on the drive, anyway.

After using the IBM recovery disc to reinstall Windows XP SP2 on the new drive, Windows Explorer showed me that I had 69.8 gig of free space. Now I know that Windows will NEVER show the real space because of the what constitutes a real gig and what hardware manufacturers count as a gig (straight 1,000,000,000), but my math shows me even with the difference, I should be showing 74 or so gig, not 69.

What could be taking up that much room that I cannot see? Is IBM's onboard Rescue and Recovery the culprit? Something else?

Just seems odd, but I'm sure there is a good explanation for it.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

imaginos

[bill bolton]

It says 80 g on the drive, anyway.

That's about 75G for the empty drive, in terms of the way Windows measures formatted disk space, so by the time you install Windows and the Think Vantage utilities, 69G+ remaining is about right.

Cheers,

Bill

[NS]

Hello all.

Quick question about hard drive space after a reinstall. Recently my 80 g hard drive crashed and IBM sent me a new one under warranty. It says 80 g on the drive, anyway.

After using the IBM recovery disc to reinstall Windows XP SP2 on the new drive, Windows Explorer showed me that I had 69.8 gig of free space. Now I know that Windows will NEVER show the real space because of the what constitutes a real gig and what hardware manufacturers count as a gig (straight 1,000,000,000), but my math shows me even with the difference, I should be showing 74 or so gig, not 69.

What could be taking up that much room that I cannot see? Is IBM's onboard Rescue and Recovery the culprit? Something else?

Just seems odd, but I'm sure there is a good explanation for it.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

imaginos

IBM_service partition has already taken up the 3GB space.

[imaginos]

Much appreciated. Thanks for the confirmation. I figured IBM was taking a bit more than other installations.

imaginos

[carbon_unit]

The difference between the 74 gig and the 69 gig is the service partition including the data to create the restore discs (7 cd's) or restore the system.