Harddrive problem

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Guest

I have recently installed XP Pro (big mistake, which I'd stuck with ME) and
have notice that my harddrive was not formatted properly and is reading only
75gb instead of 80gb and I have this strange suspision that the 5gb is
containing data which is causing my system some serious problems. Have been
told that once you have XP on your system you cannot do a format to erase
everything and get back the full amount of gb on your harddrive. Does anyone
know if this is true and is there a way of formatting my harddrive so I have
a 'clean' harddrive to work with, also how do I go about it from scratch? and
would I be better of with XP Home Ed as I dont need networking?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Derek
 
If you are saying the hd manu states the hd size is 80gb, when it is
formated it will be less, about 75gb.
This is normal, and due to different interpretations of 1gb, as a byte size.

It is often best to do a clean install of an o/s particularly when moving
from a win9* o/s, which ME is.
The winxp is bootable, and can be used to delete/create/format partitions
http://michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html

Winxp home also has network capabilities
Ensure you have a backup of any data, as it will be lost during a clean
install
Also ensure that you visit either your PC manu site, or mobo manu site, and
other hw sites to download / install mobo chipset and other drivers for
winxp. Do NOT use winupdate for drivers, or rely on the default winxp
drivers
 
The only thing i'm not sure how to do and that is to format my harddrive
without using the XP disk, that way I should hopefully end up with a
completely clean harddrive.
 
It depends.

If you wish to perform a clean installation of WinXP,
simply boot the machine with your WinXP CD,
follow the prompts and allow your disk to be formatted
when getting the opportunity.

If you wish to go back to WinME (which is IMHO a
vastly inferior operating system), repost your question
in a WinME newsgroup. I'm sure that the WinME CD
lets you format your disk in some way.

And by the way: It is extremely unlikely that your "missing"
5 GBytes of disk space is causing you problems. As DL
said, the space is not really missing. It is far more likely
that the upgrade from ME to XP did not go well. A clean
installation will fix this.
 
The manufacturer say 80G.(phisical space in total)
Window say 75G which is right.
Look at the harddrive property which may shaw in bytes.
1G = 1024M, 1M=1024 Bytes.
The Disk management reserves some phisical tracks for the alternative
tracks. ie flawed tracks etc..
The O/S also uses the blocks for disk managements(index, etc.)
The manufacturer's 80G includes the window's space and the user's data
spaces.
 
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