Size of Harddisk

Hi there. Got an AO532h netbook with (supposedly) a size of 160 GB. It's running Windows 7 starter.
When you click on Properties, it shows how much is free out of 136 GB. Something must be occupying the 24 GB space, but Acer support doesn't say. Their answer was something like: 'after formatting and partitioning, this is what is left'. My conclusion is that there must be a hidden partition with some data on it. Does anyone know how to know for sure what's on the 24 GB? If it is recovery data, why do they want you to make recovery disks when you first turn on your machine?
Thanks in advance for your help.

 

Hi,

Similar experience here but can probably explain. I just got an eMachines netbook (similar to an Aspire One) with Hitachi 160GB HDD. It has Windows XP pre-loaded. Reports total disk size of 148,297,295,360 bytes (139GB). HDD manufacturers are a bit naughty in this respect. For starters they claim a GB for each 1,000,000,000 bytes whereas to an operating system (Windows) a GB is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes. Debatable I guess; metric system (hence Giga prefix) predates computers. That means that the 160GB to the manufacturer is 149GB to Windows. The error is then compounded when the HDD is formatted and partitioned (manufacturer is quoting a gross capacity for a virgin drive). This must be what reduces the 149GB to 137GB-139GB (variance probably depends on the operating system).

Some HDD manufacturers advertise formatted capacity which is more accurate (though they will still claim a GB for each 1,000,000,000 bytes in their calculation).

Anyway, I hope the above is where I have "lost" 21GB otherwise I will be more irritated.

blackfish

 

The above post is part right, Any hard drive, after partitioning and formatting will show as missing several (or more) megabytes or gigabytes of storage.

But, the main reason you're missing so many gigabytes is because there is a hidden partition created by Acer. The recovery partition. This is what stores all your factory restore information for when you initialise D2D recovery from the POST screen.