To anyone that knows anything about computers

[Zumi]

A couple years ago my hard drive crashed. So I bought a 160 gb hard drive to replace it however when I intstalled my computer only recognized 127 GB. It always bugged me how do i get the extra space that it doesn't recognize. Someone said I might have to make a new partition, how would I do that if that is the problem.

[Zumi]

Here is a picture of the problem.

[Rathanel]

First off, there are two common definitions of gigabyte...

The first means 1,000,000,000 bytes, and is the definition used by almost all hardware manufacturers.

The second, properly referred to as GiB, means 1,073,741,824 bytes, and is the definition used by Microsoft when relating the amount of space on some storage device.

The result is that a 160 GB drive (as listed on the box) is actually 149 GiB (as used by your computer.

Unfortunately, this doesn't entirely account for the lost space on your hard drive.

Since creating a partition requires you have either currently unpartitioned space (which I suppose is possible, since you have extra space not currently being used) or creating such space by deleting a current partition (which would mean essentially wiping all information you have), I wouldn't advise doing that unless you have are sure you have currently unused space or have a way to back up all of your vital info. If you don't mind losing all the info you have on that harddrive, you could use the windows setup utility to wipe your harddrive, delete your current partition, create a new partition using all available space, format said partition into NTFS, and then reinstall windows.

And all of that is made pointless by Zumi's second post >.>

You should be able to use the computer manager to format and partition your currently unallocated space. I'm not on a Windows machine atm, so I can't write out the steps for you.