Hi George,
Two factors affect what you see: First, the partition is aligned and you
will lose a small amount of space. Normally this is only a couple of MB, so
is negligible.
The second is the more critical factor in the way that space is calculated.
A drive manufacturer terms a single GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes using base-10
math, the same stuff we all were taught in grade school. Windows (like any
computer operating system) uses binary math (base-2) to calculate, and that
means that a single GB is 1024x1024x1024 or 1,073,741,824 bytes. Knowing
this, to the drive manufacturer 320,000,000,000 bytes is 320GB, but Windows
will see it as 320,000,000,000 divided by the base-2 definition of a GB, or
298GB.
So, all the bytes are there, it's just a matter of how you are looking at
it.
--
Best of Luck,
Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
Windows help -
www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts
http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com