HHD Size Reporting Differences

I recently merged a small 'D: restore' partition (old Vista OS backup) into C: (now one partition). I would now like to recreate a D partition for data but I noticed that my HHD size as reported from Disk Management is 465GB, which differs from Explorer and OEM 500GB cap. In Explorer properties, there are two columns of data for used, free space, and capacity. First column reports 500GB cap., second column matches disk mgmt @ 465GB. Used and free space numbers differ also but second column matches Disk mgnt data. Disk mgnt does not show any unallocated space.

Puzzled as to the 35GB whereabouts...?

This has been covered many times over the life of the PC. It boils down to the difference of how disk sizes are reported. Vendors report full size capacity in character bytes and Windows reports based on KB. (1kb = 1024)

So 465GB in Windows is 465 x 1024^3 = 499,289,948,160 character bytes. (Rounded minus the decimals in your numbers)

By the way, it's HDD. It stands for Hard Disk Drive.

thanks for the lesson....

Actually you are all wrong. Remember the story about the payroll programmer who rounded down all the half cents, transferred them to his account and skipped the country?

Well, I've been stealing all those 'missing' MB's for years and have built the server to end all servers. Next step - world domination!