100GB hard drive has only 88GB?

[Bobdare]

After formating/deleting my 100GB hard drive before installing vista, it showed that the hard drive has only 88 GB. I'm assuming it's because of the hidden recovery thinkvantage partition. Is there anyway to get rid of that? Or is this normal and part of the hard drive raw settings?

[agarza]

Decimal vs. Binary:
For simplicity and consistency, hard drive manufacturers define a megabyte
as 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte as 1,000,000,000 bytes. This is a decimal
(base 10) measurement and is the industry standard. However, certain system
BIOSs, FDISK and Windows define a megabyte as 1,048,576 bytes and a gigabyte as 1,073,741,824 bytes. Mac systems also use these values.
These are binary (base 2) measurements.
To Determine Decimal Capacity:
A decimal capacity is determined by dividing the total number of bytes,
by the number of bytes per gigabyte (1,000,000,000 using base 10).

To Determine Binary Capacity:
A binary capacity is determined by dividing the total number of bytes,
by the number of bytes per gigabyte (1,073,741,824 using base 2).

In other words, for example---
The Decimal Capacity of a 40GB HDD is
40GB
The Binary Capacity is
37.25GB

My 60GB HDD is 55.78
Computers use Binary.

Bigger the drive, the less you have in Binary terms.

Recovery partition uses about 3-4GB depending on your machine

[dr_st]

A 100GB hard-drive is really a 93GB drive, as explained by benottomex. Minus the size of the recovery partition you get the 88GB you have. All is normal.

[pinesol]

After formating/deleting my 100GB hard drive before installing vista, it showed that the hard drive has only 88 GB. I'm assuming it's because of the hidden recovery thinkvantage partition. Is there anyway to get rid of that? Or is this normal and part of the hard drive raw settings?

You can delete the service partition with disk manipulating programs such as Partition Magic. Then reformat the drive.

[ghosh9691]

Why the disk is 88GB has been explained earlier. How to get rid of it? Easy!

Step 1: Get GParted Live CD from the net and burn it on a CD. This live image is actually a bootable CD.
Step 2: Go to BIOS and find the setting that makes the hidden partition visible to the OS. It's called "PreDesktop Area"
Step 3: Boot with the GParted CD and delete the recovery partition...and you will end up with a 93 GB drive.

CAUTION: You should have already made your Win XP recovery disks!!!

[Bobdare]

Why the disk is 88GB has been explained earlier. How to get rid of it? Easy!

CAUTION: You should have already made your Win XP recovery disks!!!

I haven't. I'm on Vista now. So when I do this I would gain 5GBs but would have to reformat? I just made a full pc backup using the vista business option. Are those DVDs enough or will I have to re install drivers and download updates all over again? More importantly, would I need the original Vista key. I lost that and waiting for microsoft to reply to me.

[ghosh9691]

It sounds like you cannot re-install Vista at this time due to lack of the CD key. In that case, you have a couple of options:

Option 1: Go to BIOS and in the "pre-desktop" area, change the setting to make the hidden partition visible to the OS. Once that is done, boot the computer into Vista, and using the Computer Management from the control panel, you should be able to see the previously hidden partition. You can then format this partition. This will leave you with 2 partitions on your disk. One partition containin Vista with 88 GB size and another one with approx. 5 GB size. All your data will still be safe. As will the programs and drivers that you installed.

Option 2: Wait until you get your key from Microsoft. Then follow the steps in my previous post to get one large partition of about 93 GB size. This will mean that your hard disk will be reformatted and you will need to reinstall the OS, drivers from Lenovo and all your programs/data.

Just make sure you have a backup of your data and then download all the latest Lenovo drivers on to a CD/DVD. If you have the drivers with you on a media, when you do re-install, you won't have to download them all

Let me know if you have any more questions....I have only done this on my Z61m about a dozen times...