Missing HD space & Dell Driver Q's

Great install! Clean and fast. However I am puzzled to see that part of my 320 gb 7200 drive is not recognized. A right click on C drive states that I have 282 GB left out of 297GB. I do not want to move forward with my install before accounting for this space. So...anyone have any advice?

As I have a Dell Studio XPS 1640 it has a a few of Dell specific driver I must install or I wil not have certain features. I am not thinking dock here. Bios ,chipset, IDT Sc. Windows grabbed the latest driver for the Radeon 3670 but not the Catalyst SW. Nor would I want it to. Has anyone dl'd the latest Catalyst suite? Any fellow xps owners out there test driven Dell's drivers on Win 7 pro yet?

I did post this a few times (minus ther missing drive space) here but to to effect. I am hoping that enough people have had their hands on Windows 7 now to offer some advice.

Thanks,

J

 

For the hard drive space, it won't show up as 320 gb under windows. I think it has to do with the 1000 != 1024 thing, but I could be wrong.

On Win7, I've been using it for a few months now (64-bit, pro).

I'm using the latest catalyst suite that ATI released for their mobility cards. Apparently now ATI directly provides mobility drivers, but for Win7 only. As far as other drivers, I've found that any vista driver works just as good in win7. Only thing was my IR port wouldn't install from the disk, but windows downloaded and installed a driver automatically for it anyways.

 

really? so you did clean install, did you also wipe out the recovery partition?

my factory state is 283GB free on C drive and 14.6GB for recovery partition for a 320GB, 7200rpm drive.

 

Thanks for the reply.
Regards,
J

 

After deletion of partition you would be left with 297-98 , with a 64 bit install of course.

 

You will only get 90% of what that's advertised.

 

You got 320GB = 320 * 10^9 bytes while this is not true because 1GB = 1024MB and 1MB = 1024KB and 1KB = 1024

320 * 10^9 / 1024 = Total KB
Total KB / 1024 = Total MB
Total MB /1024 = Total GB

Total GB is what you must have. Now, I'm not entirely sure about this, since there seems to be a loss when you format your drive or so I have been told.

 

With thanks to Airbot...
There's another way to calculate the advertised to actual though with the ratios you might want to add to your above post.

Just multiply the advertised size with the correct ratio.




(kilobyte Example - 500.000.000.000 byte multiplied by 0.9765625 = 488.28125
488.281.250 kbyte multiplied by 0.9765625 = 476.837158203125
476.837 Mbyte multiplied by 0.9765625 = 465.6611328125)

Kilobyte - 0.9765625

Megabyte - 0.9536743

Gigabyte - 0.9313226

Terabyte - 0.9094947

Petabyte - 0.8881784



So, let's say I have an advertised HDD size of 500GB, and want to find the actual size that you'll see..


500GB multiplied by 0.9313226 = 465.6613
My System SpecsSystem Spec

 

Rather than showing how to get to the actual amount of GB I tried to explain as of where it comes from and why is it like that. Of course you could use the ratio like that.

Let's make it even more simple, in a single formula.

((Advertised space of GB) * (10 ^ 9)) / 1024^x

Where x is the respective number for the output size:

x = 0 | Output bytes
x = 1 | Output KB
x = 2 | Output MB
x = 3 | Output GB
x = 4 | Output TB

Edit: After reading the thread thoroughly, it seems you stated that you got your missing space fixed already. You should try to bold replies on a quote, I got lost there for a bit .

 

Another thing that I heard was that the restore points take up quite a bit of space. Someone explained it on here before, but I forgot unfortunately. But, the amount of space that they can take up on the hard drive is quite astonishing. This was referenced when running vista, but with 7 I'd imagine its similar. In any case, there is a manner in which to limit the amount of space that restore points can take up, you'd probably just need to google it and it'll show up.

Note that this only references how much space is left on your hard drive, not the initial out of 283 total. For example mine was up to 50 GB used after only a couple days, without any sizable downloads or anything of that nature, as I believe whenever a program is installed a restore point is set up.

Disclaimer: I don't know if any of this is true, but its what I read before on here Hope it helps