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XP Showing HardDrive Size Smaller Than Physical Size - Why?

Hi all -
Scenario is this - XP Pro XP2 w/ updates. Three Western Digital harddrives - 1 x 120g, 2 x 320g.
XP shows the 120 as 111.79 and the 320's are shown as 298.09 ....
I've just bought the 2nd 320 as a recovery disk to image the first 320 to - and it tells me it's too small!
So .... XP is telling me 298.09 .... does it just 'report' it that way for some damn reason OR are my 320's acutally physically smaller than what's on the label and if so does anyone know why?

(Accept my appologies in advance if this type of question has been covered before but I could not find a similar question in my searches.)

Thanks very much in advance .....

(anyone want a week old 320? Grrrrrrrr!!)

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Ibrahim Bazarwala

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SOLUTION

Brian Pierce

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DAQLD

ASKER

Gents, thank you both.
My lamen response? That sucks.
Especially the "This and the binary maths issue resuts in typcal sizes being in the region of 10% lower than the manufacture's published capacity" part ... makes you wonder what other things we don't know.
If I find out tomorrow that my new C2D is only as good as first Celeron 400, I'll peak! :0

I'm at a bit of a loss as to my my '320' image won't fit on my empty '320' disk but I guess that a whole other set of points .... I guess I can look forward to spending another $200+ tomorrow on a 500Gig that's only going to be around 460 by the sounds of things.
Thanks again for your explanations and solving this little mystery for me - I'll split between you both.

DAQLD

ASKER

Just as a footnote - my 400 gig drive clocks in at 372.61gig.