Why is my hard drive missing about 5 gigs?

Can you explain in a bit more detail what you mean? Do you mean that your 500gb hdd only shows 495gb? If thats the case thats normal due to the way they advertise hard disk sizes. 1Gb does not equal 1000mb.

Yeah like my netbook is advertised to have 160GB. But has 142GB.

Could also be a recovery partition, those are not always advertised as being there by all OEMs.

@ wrote:
I'm about 5 gigs short of what I should have. What could be the cause?

Hi OP, this could berelated to how Windows reports the partition and how the manufactures sell the hard drives.
 
Windows reads in 1024 mode while Linux / Mac is 1000 - that's why right now, my iMac drive displays as 1 billion bits (exactly 1TB) but in Windows, the exact same drive would only display about 930GB (bits divided by 1024 vs 1000).
 
E.g - A 500GB drive is actually a 500,000,000,000 byte drive.
 
To calculate / convert from bits to bytes, you do the following:
 
500/1024/1024/1024*1000*1000*1000= 465.661
 
I'm guessing you have an 80GB hard drive since in Windows, this would be displayed as c. 74.5GB ;)
 
 

No, this is about how I had 5 more gigs on my hard drive when looking at the space left under the computer tab. 5 gigs which are now gone and taken up by something. I already knew about the advertising thing.

I should add (I need an edit button) that I have loading nothing into it that could take up those 5 gigs.

Do you have Windows system restore on? If everything is running OK you can turn it off or click delete to purge all the restore points if you have Vista or Win 7 or Win 8 as it can take alot of space?
 
HTH,
 
Daniel
 

I don't think I have it on. I'll have to check.

Edit is under "Options" at the top right side of your post. 🙂

Clicking options just takes me to the top of the page. Probably no script's fault.

@ wrote:
Clicking options just takes me to the top of the page. Probably no script's fault.

You don't see this part in your post?
 
Daniel
 

@cloud
Yes NoScript is causing it. Just temporarily allow all the page. No need to allow doubleclick.net Allowing others will do. Then you can click on option which would show just like the one shown in @ 's post.