where is my 25gigs of hard drive? AHH

[xxsicknessxx]

I had computer problems awhile back and sent my computer to be fixed, ended up having to have a buddy restore it using system restore disks from toshiba. I dunno what that did or what options were picked but somehow my computer

toshiba satellite c675d-s7101
500gig HD it says ended up with 3 partions

1 is 450gigs Cdriver

1 is system
1.5gigs

1is hd recover
13.24gigs

So where is my missing space? is this normal? Im using partion magic to try and figuer this out. what could of happned? says my driver is 465gigs? that seems wrong..

Like said I took get fixed and ended up using restore cds they said a motherboard issue.

Not big deal just seems odd space is missing lol

 

[xxsicknessxx]

Toshiba - 17.3" Satellite Laptop - 4GB Memory - 500GB Hard Drive - Black - C675D-S7101

 

[fseal]

500"Gig" harddrive is 500 X 1,000,000,000 bytes (Gigabytes)

Inside windows it's reported as 465 X 1073741824 = 499,289,948,160 bytes

465 "Gibibytes" == 500 "Gigabytes"

So the size is actually the same, but HD manucfacturers are using a NON computer numbering sceme to advertise their wares because it looks larger. Windows and all other OSes use the computers version of a "Gig" with is larger, so the number of them appear smaller.

 

[whs]

This is a classic question and fseal explained it nicely. The 7% difference (at the GB level) between the decimal numbers on the box and the binary numbers in the system are completely normal. You 'lost' nothing. All your bytes are there. Read up on the binary number system and you will understand.