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    80GB HDD showing up as 68GB

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by synic, Jun 13, 2008.

  1. synic

    synic Notebook Deity

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    this is in my "mini-review" thread, but so it gets some more love i'm going to make it it's own thread.

    is an 80gb HDD supposed to show up as ~67-69gb after it's formatted or do I still have the hidden partition on my drive?
     
    synic, Jun 13, 2008
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  2. The_Observer

    The_Observer 9262 is the best:)

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    is the capacity 80GB?If so I think that's natural due to difference in the way computer and we measure space.
     
    The_Observer, Jun 13, 2008
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  3. techboydino

    techboydino Notebook Evangelist

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    download windirstat and see whats eating up your space. your drive is not exactly 80GB plus Vista takes up a lot for restore files and another 1-2GB for pagefile. Yours is about right.
     
    techboydino, Jun 13, 2008
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  4. synic

    synic Notebook Deity

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    i know there's a difference, i just didn't know how much. i assumed when i got my laptop that there was this hidden partition with all of the factory setting stored on it which is supposed to take up aboue 6gb of space or something, but when i went to reinstall vista there was only 1 partition.

    so now i'm just confused. did i not have a "hidden" partition? can vista install not see it, must i used something like GParted to see it? i don't understand where it is...
     
    synic, Jun 13, 2008
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  5. Purehazard

    Purehazard Notebook Evangelist

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    I don't know about your Thinkpad but with the SZ680N, even if you remove all the partitions, the recovery disc will create a recovery partition again.

    So, an 80GB drive will typically give you 74-76GB after format. You may still have a recovery partition if you used your recovery discs to reinstall Vista.
     
    Purehazard, Jun 13, 2008
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  6. techboydino

    techboydino Notebook Evangelist

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    boot to gparted or just look at disk management to be sure.
     
    techboydino, Jun 13, 2008
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  7. Purehazard

    Purehazard Notebook Evangelist

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    Right-click "My Computer" and choose "Manage". Then choose "Disk Management" on the left side of the window. This should show all the partitions, including the hidden recovery one.
     
    Purehazard, Jun 13, 2008
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  8. synic

    synic Notebook Deity

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    yea, i'm going to do that later. if it's there i guess i'll just delete and merge the unallocated space with the main partition.
     
    synic, Jun 13, 2008
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  9. synic

    synic Notebook Deity

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    oh yea.. i didn't know that would show the "hidden" one too.
     
    synic, Jun 13, 2008
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  10. Arki

    Arki Super Moderator

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    The actual amount of space of an advertised hard drive is about 93%. So if you have an advertised 80GB, in reality, you have about 75.5GB. Take away about 4-5GB for the Vista recovery partition brings it to about 70GB. The other 2GB could probably be from miscellaneous software/files.
     
    Arki, Jun 14, 2008
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  11. synic

    synic Notebook Deity

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    actually, theres a 6.55gb partition with nothing on it.. hm
     
    synic, Jun 14, 2008
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  12. synic

    synic Notebook Deity

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    so i popped in parted magic yesterday and used gparted to delete the 6.55gb partition (i guess i never deleted the hidden partition, it was full too). after it was deleted i re-sized the main partition and included the 6.55gb of unallocated space. after about 3-4 hours of it working, it was finally done and i attempted to start up my machine, which lead to an error that told me winload.exe was corrupt or missing.

    after cursing at my laptop for a minute, i popped in my vista disc and repaired my vista installation, then my laptop ran chkdsk, and then it booted up fine. everything seems to be working now though.
     
    synic, Jun 15, 2008
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  13. zephyrus17

    zephyrus17 Notebook Deity

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    It also matters what filesystem you use. XFS and JFS gives up to 99% of the HD. But since you're using Vista, I guess it's only NTFS, then..
     
    zephyrus17, Jun 16, 2008
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