Where is the rest of the HD?

It's hidden from you and I'm using it.
Actually I'm not totally sure. I know a part of the unaccessable space gets eaten up in setting up the pointers for the formatted area, some may have been bad and bypassed, and finally the maker may have just lied flat out or used a different scale like a 17in monitor being any monitor with over 15 inches of viewable space but less than 17 inches.

Do you have a small diagnostics partition or a partition for suspend to disk.

Compaqs used to have a five meg partition for the cmos gui.

Some disk drive manufacturers tell you the "RAW" size of the drive and not the Size that is available for a partition.

When you partition a disk you are using some of the space for the partition information.

Also when you format the disk spaceis taken up by the actual format data reducing the amount of space to actually hold data.

The Size of the clusters that are used also affect the total free space for the drive.

If you go to the drive MFG's web site you can look up the specs for your hard drive.

the physical characteristic of where data is stored on the platters in hard drive are like millions of little peas each capable of having one side positivly charged and the other side negatively charged. Accectable mfg defects [a + or - % defective of that space] reflects the lost available space that a disk partitioning tool will report. [ also a small, almost neglible amount of space is used for the File allocation table, master boot record and partition information when formatting.

When makers of hard drives calculate gigs they use the method that 1000 megs =1gig. In real life 1024 megs = 1gig. So while your manufacturer says 60 gigs in reality you only have about 57gigs. Windows reads it the correct way, thats why you see itas about 57gb

That seems to be about the normal. Even using the manufacturers utilities one seems to lose from 2 to 4 GB as one moves to a larger drive. Remember even the the standard small IDE drive never came up showing the stated size. My thought is that it isthe pointers and MBR that use this space. My 80 GB shows as 76.3GB, My 40 GB shows as 39.2 GB, My 8.6 GB shows as 8.0.

the answer is kind of simple really the amount of space is the raw unformatted capacity of the drive. once the drive is fdisked and formatted the layout of the drive ie the formatting takes up space

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