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GParted forum → Live Media → 135 GB Missing from Hard Drive
SOLVED New to G-Parted and to this forum. Successfully created partitions on my new hard drive. I changed my mind and then deleted and recreated until I was happy with the sizes etc. When I got to doing the final logical partitions I saw that I had lost 135 GB from my hard drive. What have I done wrong and how can I recover that 135 GB?
There is usually never "lost" disk space, except a few very special cases, related to the BIOS and the operating system of the computer and concerning hard drives bigger than what the specific BIOS or operating system can support.
This is the case of the 1990s computers that didn't see more that 127GiB on a hard drive, and the more recent case is related to the newest big hard drives (3 or 4 TB), that can be seen as almost 2TB in older computers.
The usual case is that some operating systems wrongly report the partition size numbers as GB or MB, instead of GiB or MiB. 1 GiB = 1024x1024x1024 bytes, 1 GB = 1000x1000x1000 bytes.
Drive manufacturers of course prefer to promote the GB capacity (it is written with very small letters on the hard drive, on the package and in their web pages, to avoid juridic issues), anyway, the total number of bytes is the same.
Is your drive 2TB?
To check this, try to get the partition sizes in bytes.
Please, take into account some other slight "lost" segments, that are really reserved by the system:
The first partition starts on the 1st MiB limit, and there is at least 1 MiB empty at the end of the disk space.
Some similar spaces can be found between partitions too.
During the creation of the file system, some disk space is reserved for file tables. For a ntfs file system this is initially rather small, and grows as far as the disk space is filled with data. Try to keep 10% or more free space in your system hard drive, otherwise unexpected things can occur!
In the case of the Linux file systems (ext3, ext4) there is a bigger reserved disk space (5% by default), that prevents the operating system to crash if the hard drive is full.
Yes my hard drive is 2 TB and it is brand new so there is nothing on it except windows 7.
I wasn't aware that when partitioning you can move the top counter and start the partion in a different position which can cause a loss of some of your bytes.
I only discovered this later and was wondering if it was possible that I haven't paid attention and have done this with several of my partions.
I was using the multiple of 1024 to calculate my partitions and all my partitons are empty except for Windows 7 partition. So there is heaps of free space. I would have thought that 135 Gb was a bit too much to go missing. My computer is only 12 months old but it came with only 120GB hard drive. My son was going to leave the old hard drive in and add the new one but it only had one connection for the cables so we had to take the old one out.
Could this mean that my PC is not able to cope with a@TB hard drive.
My son insisted that I use Windows 7 to partition with but I said no that I really liked G-Parted. Now he's going to say "I told you so". I really need to get it back to 2TB.
I tried deleting all my partitions and even took Windows off but it didn't make any difference.
Don't panic!
I think you have no lost space.
As I wrote above, several "empty" segments are needed by the system architecture. They contain the partition table, a partition table backup for latest systems, the boot loader etc. It has nothing to do with GParted, simply with GParted you are able to find all this 
This is valid for any operating system. You 'll find this by looking several hard drives with GParted.
To know the partition info in detail, you can use the command
sudo fdisk -lu
in the terminal window, from GParted. It shows the partition start and end with sector precision (512 bytes).
An empty partition isn't really empty. There are no user's files but there is info related to the file system and the partition structure. After all, a hard drive isn't just a box where we put files. The operating system has to be able to manage them efficiently.
There is another really lost space, that is due to the minimum allocation size for each file. This is 4096 bytes by default for ntfs. This means that even a tiny file of 10 or 50 bytes takes at least 4096 bytes on disk. A 4097 byte file takes 2x4096 bytes. However, we can do nothing for this, it is related to the file system.
Could this mean that my PC is not able to cope with a@TB hard drive.
I think, there is no problem for hard drives up to 2TB.
I have on my desk a box from 2007 with four 2TB hard drives in it (+ one 320GB system drive). They work with no problem.
For bigger hard drives, it isn't clear. 3TB drives are about 2 years in the market, 4TB drives are even newer.
In general, UEFI BIOS is needed for the motherboard, as well as hardware compatibility for the controller and chipset. In most cases, this isn't the case of small personal computers.
Manufacturers also recommend an additional controller on a PCI-express port.
Furthermore, 64 bit operating system is needed.
It seems that manufacturers are too optimistic in their advertising. We had last year many reports on problems and inability to setup 3TB drives, even in very new hardware computers. I found a similar situation in several forums, including Seagate support and newegg user comments (with half of the comments to 1-2 stars).
It seems that there is no full compatibility with older hardware and software.
Sorry for delay but have PC problems at work too. I would think that if I reinstalled Windows 7 and deleted all the partitions and formatted the disk whilst doing the installation that it would show then that it was 2 TB hard drive. My disk is an OEM version but I've been told it is exactly same as the retail version
In order to see the layout of the partitions on your disk drive, would you be able to provide output from the following two commands?
sudo fdisk -l -uwhere one of the options is a lower case "L" and not the number one.
sudo parted /path-to-your-device unit s printwhere /path-to-your-device is something like /dev/sda.
Thank you gedakc for your help but I think I had better pass on this as I am a novice and it is all a bit above my head. I was able to do a screen shot of the first command and it is in /home/user.
But the 2nd one I don't even understand how to find the path. I haven't even really found my way around G_parted yet.
My hard drive is 2 TB so 135 GB is really nothing to worry about. Later on I will probably feel the challenge to find that 135 GB but for now I will just concentrate on my computer skills. Thanks again.
From all the above, I am 99.9% sure that you have no lost space.
Just think that 1TB is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes.
1TiB is 1024x1024x1024x1024 = 1099511627776 bytes.
A 2TB hard drive appears in the windows explorer as 1.82TiB drive.
This is normal. The wrong is that windows explorer uses the unit "TB", instead of TiB.
Something I forgot previously:
The laptop computers contain hidden partitions for system recovery and maintenance tools. These partitions can make a total of a few 10s of GiB. There is no letter for these partitions, so you can't access them by the windows explorer. Obviously this isn't lost space, it is just used for system recovery and maintenance needs.
About the screenshots: perhaps they were saved under the same name and the second one overwrote the first one.
You could take a photo of the screen with a photo camera too, if you still have any doubt.
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