Determinig disk space

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Determinig disk space

by Andrew
(New York)

How do I determine how much hard drive space I have. I purchased a refurbished laptop that is supposed to have 40GB hard drive, as soon as I began to use it I got a message saying"you are running out of disk space on local (D:). I checked the space on D it says 5.85 GB, C says 31.3 GB, the total does not equal 40 GB.

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Determinig disk space

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Mar 21, 2009
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Drive capacity
by: Support

Hello Andrew,

The capacity of a 'raw' hard drive and the capacity of a formatted hard drive will be different, your hard drive has two partitions:
5.85 GB, C says 31.3 GB added together the formatted capacity is 37.1 Giga Bytes, which is correct. Formatting the drive takes some of the advertised capacity to create the tables, cylinders, and sectors of the formatted hard drive.

What you have is a hard drive that was used then not wiped before installing the operating system, normally you would have either one large hard drive of say 37.1 GB or two smaller partitions of say 15 GB and 11 GB each and the Operating System would be installed on the C: partition.

When the owner reinstalled the Operating System they selected the D: drive for the fresh install, then formatted the C: drive to remove the old OS and their data.

You can either wipe the drive and start fresh with a installation of the OS on the C: partition and have two partitions as I mentioned above by splitting the hard drive in to two almost equal partitions or one large partition.

Or using the instructions in my How To... section optimize the OS and move the swap/paging file over to the C: partition. This is a temporary fix and you will need to make the C: partition the boot partition sooner or later because the size of the D: partition is just to small for normal everyday operations.

Hope this helps...

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