160GB HDD reduced to 140GB due to formatting

Asked By jonsondevid 0 points N/A Posted on - 08/08/2011

I have a hard disk of 160 GB space. Due to regular formatting my HDD space reduced to 140 GB. I lost 20 GB. I want to recover lost space in the HDD.

Is their any solution for it? If any kindly help me.

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Answered By DonaldSantiago 0 points N/A #112087

160GB HDD reduced to 140GB due to formatting

Your hard drive space not reduced after formatting. That space actually wasn't there at all. Probably you ask yourself how can that be. It is very simple. When you say 140 GB space, it really isn't so.

When you buy a hard drive, manufacturer marked that as 140 GB and it is actually 120 GB. It is because of definitions of mega and GIGA. Manufacturers mark hard drives as 1,000 for kilo, which makes mega 1,000 kilo. But operating system doesn't use same standard but binary. In that case kilo is 1,024. Then it makes a huge difference when hard drive is big, such as this one you have.

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Answered By Sharath Reddy 590495 points N/A #112088

160GB HDD reduced to 140GB due to formatting

Yes, that’s true. The printed information on the body of the hard drive or even in its package about its capacity is not the actual hard drive capacity. That’s what I noticed also with my hard drive. I have a Samsung hard drive with 40 GB capacity but its actual available space is only around 38 GB, a loss of 2 GB more or less.

You can maximize the full space of your hard drive by creating the partition manually or through the Windows setup. Or you can use some partitioning application like PowerQuest Partition Magic which is also a good way to partition your hard drive and check every partition for any possible errors.

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• Posted on - 05/12/2012
• Question Category: Hardware Components