A hard drive is one of the most important components of any computer system. You might be amazed to read that just 10 years back, the most common hard drive size available was of 10 GB and this was used to accommodate the operating system, all the software and applications, and the user data and files. Today the operating system itself requires around 13 GB of hard drive space. Now you can imagine how precious the hard drive space is and how much we need it in today’s computing world. All the applications, operating system, files, games, audio and video available nowadays are resource hungry and require free hard drive space. If you do not have enough free hard drive space available on your computer, your operating system will not work efficiently.
It might happen that you purchase a 100 GB hard drive but you don’t get the entire 100 GB to work upon. Let me explain that the entire hard drive space is never available for use because some of it is used by the hard drive itself for its book keeping called as the File System. If you want to know the total size of your hard drive, follow the simple steps given below.
Step 1: Open ‘My Computer’ window and change the view to detail.
If you have single partition on your hard drive then size of the partition will be the approximate size of your hard drive. If you have more than one partition then proceeds to step two.
Step 2: Sum the size of all the partitions which you see in this window and this should give you the approximate size of your hard drive.
If you are not sure whether entire hard drive space was utilised while creating the partitions, then follow the next steps.
Step 3: Open the ‘Run’ box and then type the command ‘DISKMGMT.MSC’ and press ‘Enter’.
This window will show you all the partitions along with any un-partitioned space on your hard drive. You can total the sizes of this partitioned and un-partitioned space to get the approximate capacity of your hard drive.
