how to format hard drive

[irishpureblood]

i got windows xp pro ..and i want to format the hard drive ie restore it to the full 80 gigs . as sony is using almost 10 gig for the recover and i got 20 gigs on c and 50 on d how do i re Partition all the drive in to one thanks any tip would really help

[rich912]

You can achieve this with a custom drive recovery, using your recovery discs (have a look here ), or a program such as Partition Magic. Either way I recommend that you back up all data first!

[irishpureblood]

thank just did the recover as you said with the sony disk told it 80 gigs but at the end when i check it said 74 and 70 gigs free so where the 6 gigs downloading partition magic to see if that can free it up .what am trying to do is just put in xp pro on the hard drive ie all of it ...thanks really want to get rid of the 6 gigs sony taking up ..any other idea

[robpaxton]

This situation typically occurs for two main reasons:

Your operating system assumes that 1 megabyte is equal to 1,048,576 bytes. Hard disk manufacturers on the other hand, assume that 1 megabyte is equal to 1,000,000 bytes. For example, a 20GB hard disk may be reported as 19GB by the operating system.

It is important to note that partitioning and formatting the drive will result in the available capacity being reduced even before any user data is written. This is entirely normal and is due to the overhead incurred in preparing a hard drive for use.

You will never get 80Gb reported.