New to vista, HD question

[Stiffler1470]

I just got a new laptop with vista. I looked at vista before but this is my first machine that runs on vista. My laptop is supposed to have a 320 gig HD. It had a 12 gig partition for recovery. I made my recovery dvd's and based on what the support on vista says, i deleted the partition and extended my c drive to the partition. My question is that it says i have 200 gigs available. My music and pics only take up about 14 gigs. I know that a 320 gig HD is not really 320 but a little less. Does vista take almost 100 gigs??? I tried scanning my HD with spacemonger but it has 40 gigs that it says unscannable. Is this the lost space? My specs for my pc are below. Hope someone can help.

HP Pavilion dv5-nr Entertainment Notebook PC
Vista Home Premium 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.00 GHz
4 gigs of RAM
320 gig HD
nvidia Geforce 9200 GS

 

[Teny]

vista should only take about 5gb, at least for me it did (Ultimate Edition)
maybe you partitioned it wrong or something.
and i think the Abbreviation for Hard Drive is HDD

 

[Stiffler1470]

It says on my computer that i used 96 gigs out of 298. but its suppose to be 320 gigs. I mean a simple reformat with my recover discs will probably fix it but i just spent a couple of hours moving my pics and music from my old pc so i dont really want to do that unless i have to.

any1? i dont want to reformat. Any other suggestions?

bump. . .

 

[Celegorm]

Between programs, any data you may have added, and system restore points, I can see that.

Open your start menu, go into programs, then accessories. Inside the system tools folder, run disk cleanup. On the "more Options" tab, press the button to delete all but the most recent restore point. This usually frees up between 20-30 gigs of space for me depending on what i've done, and how long it's been since I cleared it.

 

[JogaBonito1502]

Well, the OS reads space differently than the HDD. The HDD goes by the fact that 1k is 1000, the OS goes the fact that 1k is 1024. The OS uses GiB while the HDD uses GB. So 1GB talking in terms of OS is 1024bytes * 1024bytes * 1024bytes or in another words 1,073,741,824 bytes. Now if you multiply that by the 298GB that it says you have, you'll get a number near 320GB.

1,073,741,824 * 298 = 319,975,063,552