I have a Dell Inspiron 9400 (E1705) purchased in 2006 (Windows XP Pro version 2002 with Service Pack 3). I bought it with a 120gb hard drive. However, "My Computer" says it's a 106gb hard drive.

A programmer friend of mine took a really quick look and saw that my hard drive was divided up into 3 "partitions;" a 47mb FAT segment called "Healthy (EISA Configuration)", a 106.21gb NFTS segment called "Healthy (system)" and a 4.12gb FAT32 segment called "Healthy (unknown partition)."

He wasn't sure what the 4.12gb partition was, but noted that about 3.5gb of it is in use. That seems like a bad thing ...?

That aside, all totaled that is still only around 110gb of memory. What happened to the other 10gb? Any thoughts?

NOTES:
- He did pull the hard drive and verified that it was labeled 120gb.
- I did have a virus in January of 08 which GeeksToGo helped fix. However, I don't have any recollection of when the 10gb went missing.
- According to my Trend Micro and SUPERAntiSpyware my computer seems to be clear of viruses.
- My MS updates appear to be current except for the "Genuine Advantage" update
- One noticeable problem I have with my PC is there are a few websites I cannot access on a consistent basis; most notably DPReview.com. I can access them occasionally, but more so than not they just bomb. I have not had a problem accessing Norton or Trend Micro.

One last note: I am not a computer guy.

the first partition contains some system files (usually that one is hidden) and should be left alone....the middle one (106gb one) is the one you actually use...and the third one (4.12gb) is probably your recovery partition....system builders have stopped shipping computers with recovery disks...and instead they put an image of the OS on the drive for recovery if you run into issues

the other 10 missing could be coming from a mixture of things...one is the way device manufacturers treat MBs/GBs ..they usually round to 1000s...while the system reads it as 1024....so in computer terms (i.e. how your system sees it) a GB is 1024 MB ....however the system manufacturer is probably counting a GB as 1000 MB...so if your drive is 120GB in 1000s (as used by the manufacturer) thats 120000 MB where as the computer is expecting it to be 122880....of course that only accounts for a gig or so of difference.....some of the other space is eaten up by the data used by the system to actually make the drive usable...i can't remember what the numbers are as to how much formatting eats up on a drive but it's noticable...

Howdy:

Just an addendum, but System Restore can use up to 15% of your hdd space. That is another hidden file so it won't show in the total amount.

Murray

Thank you for the replies and peace of mind!

Just a little attachment to dsenette's post:

Drive Size in GB Approximate Total Bytes Decimal Capacity | Approximate Binary Capacity (bytes/1,073,724,841)
(bytes/1,000,000,000)

10 GB ----------------------------------------------------------------------------9.31 GB
20 GB -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 18.63 GB
30 GB -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 27.94 GB
40 GB -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 37.25 GB
60 GB -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 55.88 GB
80 GB -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 74.51 GB
100 GB ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 93.13 GB
120 GB ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 111.76 GB
160 GB ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 149.01 GB
180 GB ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 167.64 GB
200 GB ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 186.26 GB
250 GB ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 232.83 GB

10GB = 1000x3
1000x3 /1024x3= 0.931

...and the result being, the thread starter has everything OK HD-wise