Partition Size Issue

I have split my HD into two equal size partitions, one for the HFS and one for the Bootcamp, the HD size is 250gb so each partition reads as 124.9gb in OSX.
The problem I am having is that when running into CampTune, it reads both partitions at a size of 116gb, so I am loosing 8gb from each drive?
If I boot into Vista it also reads its drive as 116gb, but OSX reads both of them correctly at 124.9.
Where is this space mysteriously disappearing to, its obviously not unallocated space so where is it and why is Camptune unable to determine the correct size

 

I wouldn't say your camptune is completely incorrect. Hard drives sometime do not come the exact size as advertised. But do run a check disk in Vista to see if you get a different reading aftewards. Right-click the C drive and run scandisk.

 

With due respect, allow me to add a little more insight to this phenomenon because it drove me crazy-insane for years until I figured it out. I keep my disks and partitions tightly maintained as I am on a small budget so it's important to squeeze every last bit of space of them as I can without filling them to a point where they fail; every time I'd change up a partition or lay down a new image the numbers seemed to never add up right and it looked as if I was losing loads of space - GB's - each time.

But I wasn't.

First and foremost, it has nothing at all to do with the way a Paragon app functions (or any other partitioning app for that matter) and the good news is, there is likely no problem or issue with your re-sizing - if everything boots ok, then your data is likely fully intact.

Different apps and utilities display the drive/partition size in different ways - some display the capacity of the drive/partition as a number that reflects the size were the drive unformatted - no file systems, no partitions, no data, no partition maps, nothing. Others - like OS X's DiskUtility display the number as the capacity if the drive were formatted - like with a file system and a partition map.

Then there is the matter of base units. Typically, measures of size will be either a base-10 number or a base-2 number. Base-10 numbers interpret 1KB to mean 1,000 bytes whereas base-2 numbers 1KB = 1,024 bytes. This is sort of a marketing thing for disk makers - they like to use the method of calculation that yields the biggest number obviously so they can say they have large drives. Neither way is "the right way." Ugh.

THEN there are the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology, see http://www.nist.gov) Standards of measure - KiB, MiB, GiB (seen frequently in Linux environments) - which naturally most people who don't know what NIST is (I sure as heck didn't) assume that KiB is the same as KB, MiB is the same as MB, and GiB is the same as GB. But they aren't.

So when I finally learned all this, I realized trying to account for every last Gig of disk space was going to drive me insane... I don't even understand most of what I just wrote other than I know that it results in two different measures.

And I realized I don't really have to - if I maintain a redundant backup system (not just one backup, but two at least, if not more) I am covered should one disk end up corrupt. Of course, that takes up a lot of disk space, but compression utilities can help out with that. Also, I know in OS X what I do is a complete image of my boot partition and it only saves the portion of the partition with data on it - if its a 100gb partition and it's only half full, DiskUtility will only image the used 50gb. So right now, I have a 75gb partition for OS X, of which 21gb is used... a compressed disk image turns the backup image into a file size of about 12 or 13gb.

It's all rather mind boggling so I just threw my hands up and was like "whatever." I've got my back ups, I've restored successfully before, so it's all good.

Best,
Tom

 

Thanks tommy_b,

You are correct, due to the different methodologies for calculating what exactly a kilobyte represents there can be vastly different calculations for large drive sizes. Also, because the difference is based on relatively small amount of data, the larger the drive, the larger the difference can be, for example very large drives, such as 2TB can appear to be missing a very large amount of space(50-100GB even)