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Hard drive size wrong windows 7

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tucson sam   11-05-2009 at 12:03:26 AM

i installed a 360gb hard drive and it shows just 297gb?
windows 7 upgrade from xp

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cmichael138   11-05-2009 at 12:31:06 AM
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Windows 7 should be a clean install if you have XP.

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belial2k   11-05-2009 at 01:53:33 AM
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You never get the full amount of your advertised hard drive space. How much you get will depend on manufacturer and drive specifics. Then, depending on the amount of Ram you have, a windows 7 install can use up to 30gb of space on that drive. So what you are describing is not that unusual.

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PatrickGSR94   11-05-2009 at 04:38:34 AM
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tucson sam wrote :

i installed a 360gb hard drive and it shows just 297gb?
windows 7 upgrade from xp



Is that the reported capacity, or free space on the drive?

Windows XP reports my 1 TB WD Black HDD as having a 931 GB capacity under the disk's properties. It reports 1,000,202,240,000 bytes, but with 1,024 bytes per KB, that calculates out to 931 GB.

Manufacturer's usually just round to 1,000 bytes per KB, which can give an artificially inflated drive capacity number.

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Bronze Storage badge Paperdoc   11-05-2009 at 05:28:10 AM
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This is getting to be an old story. You are NOT missing any space at all! The problem is simply that hard drive makers say a "Gigabyte" is 1,000,000,000,bytes, but Microsoft Windows uses that same word to mean 1024 x 1024 x 1024 byte, which is 1,073,741,824 bytes. So a HDD with 360,000,000,000,bytes is called by Windows as 335.5 GB.

Now, your number of 297 sounds very familiar. I have 320 GB Seagates, and Windows says they have 298.0 GB. Are you sure about the 360 number, it's not 320?

Even if you have a 360 Gb drive, with Win 7 installed the 335 GB that Windows says it really is will be reduced by space occupied by Win 7 itself, probably over 30 GB. So is your 297 GB number the FREE SPACE? Then nothing is missing at all!

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blackhawk1928   11-07-2009 at 04:32:22 AM
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^I think he means 320GB becuase 360 is a very wierd number. I looked at some online stores and hard drive standards are 300 and 320. I couldn't find any that were 360. Moreover, a real GB is 1024 bytes, these measurements go by the number 2. So all space seen by windows 2,4,6,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048...etc, get the pattern. However the hard drive companies just label it as a 1000bytes. So as Paperdoc said, its only normal, plus even if you did a 360GB hard drive which is doubt you do, you might be looking at free space, no the actual capacity.

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Anonymous   11-20-2009 at 12:21:16 AM
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I installed windows 7 and my hard drive says I have 79.8 gb free of 224 gb on my C: and 1.12 free of 8.49 gb on my D: How can that be if I just installed it?

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belial2k   11-20-2009 at 12:45:27 AM
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If you did not wipe the hard drive before you installed, you will have a windows.old folder that contains everything from the previous install.

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