100GB WD HD only formats to 93GB?

[jbloggs]

Hi, I just installed a 100GB Western Digital as second (slave) harddrive on a Dell Dimension 4400 running WinXP Home Ed. I made the harddrive active using Disk management and created it as primary partition. It then proceeded to format the drive to 93GB. Where did the other 7GB go?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Yomicron]

Manufactures consider 1,000,000,000 bytes to be a GigaByte, while in reality it is 1,073,741,824 Bytes. The manufactures do this so that the drive sounds bigger.


100*1000000000/1073741824 = 93.13GB. So all is well.

 

[jbloggs]

Thanks Yomicron, I thought I had setup something incorrectly. Now I have 93.13GB of NTFS where I can do some video editing.

 

[Magicthyse]

Hope it's not all one partition - or the Internet Cache will eat up your storage...

 

[jbloggs]

Actually it is a single partition of 93.13GB. But its a second drive. My C drive is 40GB with Win XP so I wouldn't have thought that internet explorer would even know about the second drive unless I set it up in the Options of IE.

Also I thought you can limit the amount disk space IE can use for temp files/Cache.

 

[starwarsdad]

You can limit the size of the IE cache, but some sites will leave things in places that can't be cleaned by normal means (unfortunately my site is one of them). I have found files that were over 200 MB partial ISOs that I have downloaded. I find these files by occasionally searching for files larger than 10MB and looking at them to see if I need them or not.


As always, make a backup and be VERY CAREFUL deleting files that you have no idea what they are!

 

[jbloggs]

Wow, thats interesting. So where would I find these files and exactly what would I be looking for to delete?

 

[starwarsdad]

In XP Home, do an advanced search for files greater than x size. I would start at say 10000KB. Don't delete anything that you don't recognize. You can make the file size smaller as you get more comfortable.


You will find a lot of stuff in C:\Documents and Settings\dproffer\Local Settings. Look in the TEMP and Temporary Internet folders. You must have shown hidden / system files selected to see the Local Settings folder.