Bought new laptop, supposed to have 320 gb hard drive, only see 286?

[Mahdi]

Hello.  Last night I bought a new laptop which was supposed to ahve a 329 gb harddrive.  However, in my computer I only see two 143 gb harddrives listed - total of 286 gb.  Is there somewhere other than my computer where I can check to see where the other 34 gb are?  Or is the computer missing memory?

It's an acer aspire 5535-6389.

[D2k Sardaukar]

Perhaps it is because of recovery files on a hidden partition.

[veK]

First of all a 320GB (on paper) HDD has only a net size of ~300GB because manufacturers don't convert the GB correctly (1GB is actually 1024MB not 1000). Still you seem to be missing some GB. When you talk about 2x143 GB I guess you have 2 partitions which each being 143GB? Maybe you (or whoever made those partitions) didn't partition the remaining GB and now they are unallocated. If you have a program like PartitionMagic you can take a look there and should also see and allocate the remaining GB to one of those 2 partitions (or making a third one with 14GB which is probably not very helpful).

[D2k Sardaukar]

In windows you can also see it.

go to cmd (that dos screen) and enter compmgmt and press enter. than go to storage and diskmanagement or sumthing (I have in dutch)

there should be some information.

[Beonid]

Hmm. You're missing about 12GB by my estimates - my 320GB hard drive has a recovery partition of 9.72GB plus a main partition with 288GB. Something to do with laptop hard drives maybe? I'm using a compaq cq45 laptop.

[gryphon]

To sum it all up. a 329GB hard drive is not a multiplication of 1000 but one from 1024, then you have your filesystem overhead and finally a hidden recover partition (I guess).

It's perfectly normall for a 10GB harddrive to effectively have 9GB of space in DOS, 8GB in NTFS and 7GB in ZFS. (values are just an indication and not even close to the real amounts you get with those filesystems, just to indicate each file system has it's own overhead)

[Gruntlord6]

acer computers are crap, they are produced cheaper then any other computers I have ever seen, they always have lots of things wrong with them, if you can, I would exchange it. Get an Hp, or Toshiba.