Free space partition

hello everybody!!!

i have a HD 320GB.but when i installed vista on my pc for first time, it can
only recognise 300GB.where are the rest??

how can i restore them?
thank you very much
George

Hi George,

Two factors affect what you see: First, the partition is aligned and you
will lose a small amount of space. Normally this is only a couple of MB, so
is negligible.

The second is the more critical factor in the way that space is calculated.
A drive manufacturer terms a single GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes using base-10
math, the same stuff we all were taught in grade school. Windows (like any
computer operating system) uses binary math (base-2) to calculate, and that
means that a single GB is 1024x1024x1024 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. Knowing
this, to the drive manufacturer 320,000,000,000 bytes is 320GB, but Windows
will see it as 320,000,000,000 divided by the base-2 definition of a GB, or
298GB.

So, all the bytes are there, it's just a matter of how you are looking at
it.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

"George" <George@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:FB7D5E79-100A-49BF-8E1C-F1BBDD379965@microsoft.com...
> hello everybody!!!
>
> i have a HD 320GB.but when i installed vista on my pc for first time, it
> can
> only recognise 300GB.where are the rest??
>
> how can i restore them?
> thank you very much
> George