Vista does not see full HDD capacity

[jhef2001]

Sorry if this is a repeat question, but can anyone tell me why Vista only sees 298 GB of my 320 GB Western Digital SATA hard drive? The other hardware is as follows:

EVGA 680i SLI motherboard (122-CK-NF68-A1 version)
Intel E6600 (no overclock)
2 GB Patriot DDR2-800 RAM
EVGA 8800 GTS OC 320 Video Card
OCZ Gamexteme 700 W PSU
Vista Home Premium
Antec 900 Case

Also, I am having intermittent restarts. They are not frequent. I have had the system together and running for two days and have experienced one on each day. Thanks in advance.

 

[joke]

The biggest reason is that most HD manufacturers only claim 320,000, 000,000 bytes which most computer-folk translate into 298GBs. 8 of the other missing 10G is wasted setting up a volume - I can only guess that the last 2G may be related to formatting and other overhead items (MBR, general ntfs overhead, root directories...).

A "500G" seagate nets me < 470G when Intel's Raid Manager first gets it. I have '2T' (4 drives) that net me < 1.4T ( it's an Intel Matrix-raid: first 500G is Raid 0; all left-overs are Raid 5 - so I don't feel _too_ bad).

keep looking for the latest Nvidia drivers - do your log files (ctrl pnl->admin tools->event viewer->system logs) give any hints about the restart issue?

later.

 

[jhef2001]

Thanks. That makes sense. I just updated my bios so I'll see what that does for system stability.