Missing Space on my HDD

[LFCJohnSmith]

I bought a PC from a shop a few years ago, it came with the usual pre installed windows etc, but here'smy predicament. I have upgraded my OS and put Windows 7 ultimate on my PC and as such I have formated my HDD. Even though I have formated my HDD I still get a black screen flash up telling my the make of my PC, which was an E System. Not just that but my PC HDD currently has 75GB in total free that I can ue but when I boot my PC up the black screen that pops up, which incidently is the same screen that tells you to press any key to boot from CD, it says that the HDD has a capacity of 82GB. I presume that is where the message telling me the make of my PC is comming from as I have formated my HDD, but what I want to know is how can I get full use of all of my HDD? I should also point out that this space doesn't show up as a partition, the only reason I know it's there is because I get told the make of my PC as well as a message saying my HDD is 82GB?

 

[MindoverMaster]

Try Gparted. That should make all your partitions visible and able to format full drive. They may ber using a hidden partition as system restore.

 

[LFCJohnSmith]

If I use GParted I will also have to do a full re-intall of my OS wont I?

 

[MindoverMaster]

I believe not, Gparted should be able to add that hidden partition to your current partion, not hurting Windows.

Read up on it before doing, though.

 

[koinonas]

Maybe need to clarify something here as I think we might be confusing two issues here.

First you mention that when you get a black screen telling you the make of your computer, is this the screen that comes up after your machine "beeps" and before anything windows related shows up? If it is then this is BIOS for your computer and is at hardware level (ie not affected by anything that you install such as windows)

Second, you mention the drive is reported as 82GB. Is this on the black screen which I'm suspecting is the BIOS? If it is, then that's the entire capacity of your hard drive (ie total size of your hard drive).

Third, when you report that there is 75GB free to be used on your computer, is this being reported by windows (eg you bring up my computer, click on the drive and it reports that). If it is then you don't have any issues with the partitions at all.

The black screen reports how big the drive is in total. Windows report how much of the drive is still available to be used (ie total size minus whatever has been used by the windows installation, applications that you've installed and any other files that you might have on the hard drive).

I can't quite remember the system requirements of Windows 7, but most Operating systems will use at least 7GB on the hard drive anyway.

 

[patonb]

Isn't this a binary to numbers issue?

 

[MindoverMaster]

You mean bytes to bits, patonb? yes, that is round off, so not 100% accurate

 

[S0ULphIRE]

What's probably going on is that windows is reporting 75Gb free (even when it's freshly formatted) when the drive is actually an 80Gb drive.

That's perfectly normal, part of the drive is always reserved, so the system can shunt files around by copying them to the spare space that you can't use so that it can move other files to where those files were previously. Hope that makes sense to you lol

So to sum up, don't worry about it. It's normal.

 

[LFCJohnSmith]

What's probably going on is that windows is reporting 75Gb free (even when it's freshly formatted) when the drive is actually an 80Gb drive.

That's perfectly normal, part of the drive is always reserved, so the system can shunt files around by copying them to the spare space that you can't use so that it can move other files to where those files were previously. Hope that makes sense to you lol

So to sum up, don't worry about it. It's normal.

Thanks for letting me know that, it was really bugging me and I was losing sleep over it.

I did actually use Gparted and thought I have deleted the HDD partition but it turned out to be a system partition for starting up windows, so I ended up having to do a complete system restore.