500 Gb Hdd

[amitj]

Hi
I am new to this forum and this is my first post. I have a 500 GB WD hard drive which I used as external storage through USB. I ran into a problem.While installing linux on already existing windows xp, I deleted partition.At least thats what I think I did unknowingly. Now, my 500 GB hdd shows only 465 GB of unpartitionned space. What happened to the remaining 36 GB? If I don't partition this 465 GB (either NTFS or FAT 32), it won't show up on my PC (my computer-properties-manage) menu. There is a lot of important data on that 36 GB which I so desparately need to access.I have tried to use softwares which recover deleted partitons but , problem is that the software only searches for deleted partition on 465 GB and not the entire hdd.Any suggestions?

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Welcome to !

There's nothing missing or wrong with that drive. It is merely how Windows sees a gig and how drive manufacturers do. Windows sees it as 1,024 for a kilobyte and the drive manufacturers see it as merely 1,000. So factor that up to 500 gigs and you will see the 36 gig difference.

GetDataBack is a popular recovery software here and I've used the free trial version many times quite satisfactorily. If you are trying to recover 20 to 100 gigs of files fine but if that drive was near full I would consider paying for the full version that allows recoveries of folders (groups of files at once) and not just single files.

[pentachris]

Windows sees it as 1,024 for a kilobyte and the drive manufacturers see it as merely 1,000. So factor that up to 500 gigs and you will see the 36 gig difference.

Here's some more reading on that topic, and here's some of the backlash it has caused. I would've thought after the lawsuits HDD companies have settled, more would've been done to alleviate this confusion...

Also, formatting the drive uses some of the hard drive's space (called formatting "overhead.")

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Ah! Money in the bank! Now if I can find all my Seagate receipts...

[Mini-Me]

This has been the case now for years. It is nothing new, really. While I can appreciate that the figure stated on the label on the drive, is not actually what you will have available once the drive is formatted, this too has been the way that drives are labeled-vs-formated capacity for as long as I can remember; even BEFORE 1GB drives - 300-540MB drives were labeled exactly the same way. I suppose the difference was kinda negligible with those small capacities, but with today's hundreds of GB capacities, the difference can be pretty startling, as with the 36GB figure stated in this thread. It's a thorny legal issue, as in one respect, the drive manufactures are not labeling the capacity any differently then they always have, and on the other hand, 36GB of capacity difference between formatted and unformatted is an extremely substantial figure!!!