hidden partition in XP?

[cerulean]

I was at Best Buy the other day and unfortunately got in an argument with a tech guy there. My friend wanted a new computer and he wanted me to find a good one for him. I, being a novice with XP, wanted more information about the 40gb drive in the HP desktop because Windows reported it as 33gb. Several of the techs could not answer me and at first, refused to bring me a boot disk or take out the drive to show me that it was 40gb. Finally, someone took it out and showed me. My question is: Do different manufacturers have a hidden partition to speed up booting with XP? The computer seemed to be lightning fast on startup (< 20s) even with all of the crap software installed. I want to go back to the store and tell the guy what I would have liked to have heard from someone there (instead of "that's just the way it is")... just to minimize any arguments in the future. Thanks for any info.

[axis]

Ok well HP has the OEM version of XP with those 'Restore Discs'. They usually make two partitions on your HD, one for the backup purpose of HP, and the other for XP. My XP machine boots in about 20 sec, so thats not a shock. XP learns to boot faster after about 5-10 boots too, seeing which drivers it really needs to load, etc. Or the display comp just had a 33 gig HD. Steer away from OEM versions or restore disc versions of XP, just as bad as ME.

[jmichna]

If you formatted using NTFS, a portion of the HD was reserved for NTFS-specific format information. Don't recall if it amounted to 7gb, but on my IDE Raid-0 using twin 45gb drives, I get total of 85.7gb usable by the OS.

[BertImmenschuh]

I have 2 30GB hard drives and each shows in Windows (XP) Explorer as 28.6GB capacity each and they are FAT32.

<P ID="edit"><FONT class="small">Edited by BertImmenschuh on 11/28/01 17:42.</FONT></P>

[Andy-S]

When the vendor ships a 40GB drive he is actually providing you with 40,000,000,000 bytes of storage space. When Windows measures the drive size then it uses 1024x1024 as a megabyte and hence will report the drive as a 38.14GB drive if only one partition is present. This explains why the 30GB drives are seen as 28.6GB (30,000,000,000/(1024x1024)). As one of the previous posters stated the remaining 4GB is most likely taken up by the restore image that is stored on a hidden partition.

[BertImmenschuh]

Yes. I have been having to explain that to people as far back as the 210MB drives.