Why am i missing 3 gigabytes of free space?

[The General]

hmmm .... 7.3% ... sounds like we're getting taxed on our harddrive space.

they need to advertise real sizes.

 

[mr_wizard]

You're all wrong, that missing space is being used by the installed OS.

 

[EricB]

You're all wrong, that missing space is being used by the installed OS.

actually you are wrong. killian45 explained it best. he said what I meant, but I'm not that good of a typer

 

[Alex81388]

Go get a 120GB drive at 7200rpm 8mb cache from Seagate right now.

30 bucks at Best Buy.

 

[keba]

maybe check how much space the bin is taking? and sometimes the antivirus program has a hidden temp.

 

[Apokalipse]

Well about 7.3% of your hard drive will be lost due to formatting. The 3GB could be made up of hidden files. OR some computers have a hidden partition which has a certain amount of your hard drive in it. I think windows can recognise this partition but does not count it for some reason.

actually, it might not be 7.3%. it is determined by how many clusters there are on the hard drive. not all hard drives have the same amount of clusters.
1 cluster = 1 address on the File Allocation Table. the more clusters, the more addresses the File Allocation Table lists, therefore the more space on the hard drive is used.
and the only hidden partitions are made by Windows 2000 and XP, which take up 8MB. there is one hidden partition per drive, and only when they're formatted to NTFS.

killian explained the drive math pretty well though, which accounts for most of what is lost on any given drive. the File Allocation Table uses up little space.