I install a new 250 GB hard drive in my computer and format it. Upon checking the available space on the hard drive in My Computer, I find that there is substantially less space available than 250GB. Why?

I can think of three possibilities:

• It was pre-partitioned to that size, and more memory is available for another partiton (or to be added to that one).
• You accidentally partitioned it to that size when you formatted it.
• The hd isn't the size you thought.

You can right-click "Computer", click Manage, click left of "Storage" to expand, click "Disk Management". It should show you Disk 0 which is usually your C: drive, what percentage was used, then whether un-formatted/partitioned hd space is available.

There are many reasons.......

Maybe you have available unpartitioned space left in the hard disk. To check this:
1. Right click on the "Computer" icon on the desktop and select "manage"
2. After the Computer Management window appears, select Disk Management. It should show you if you have any unpartitioned drive space.
3. You can up or format your unpartitioned spaces from hereon. may be your harddisk is corrupted and has space 296GB only
or sometimes all drives contains some space for system file in that space is hidden

It may not work because the BIOS may not support a hard drive with this large capacity. Check the specification of your computer. The other option is to install it and then check the BIOS.
If you install this hard drive in a USB hard drive adapter case, and plug it into the USB port, most likely it will see it as and external storage device with over 200 GB capacity. You lose a small capacity when you format the hard drive.

Usually a brand new HDD needs to be formatted.
Have you done that?
If not, then you should do as follows:
Right click on My Computer, click on manage.
A new window, called Computer Management. will appear.
Click the option Disk Management from the left pane.
On the right you will see ALL the drives connected to your computer.
Select the one you want top format, right click it and choose FORMAT.
When the process is completed, you'll be able to see and use your new HArd drive.
Hope this helps.

I assume the hard drive is installed inside the desktop computer.
Depending upon the age and make of the motherboard/BIOS, it may not support a hard drive as large as the 250Gb capacity. You maybe able to upgrade the BIOS version to allow it to access the full capacity of this hard drive. Go to the motherboard manufacturer's WEB site to download the latest BIOS firmware.

Add a letter for this HDD in "control panel\performance and maintenance\administrator tools\computer manager=ment\disk management"

IF the old PC motherboard will recognize the drive while booting up, Windows 98 will also see the drive after boot-up. You may have to reformat the drive into smaller partitions.

All you have to do is physically install the drive in your old computer and attempt to boot. After the computer boots up, if the drive does not show up shut down and put the drive back in your old computer. Use the manufacturer's partitioning software available on their website to change the drive from one 250 Gb partitions to five 50 Gb partitions.

It may be due to the file system.  If formated as FAT32 files larger than 4gb may not transfer.  Try reformatting as NTFS to fix the problem.

232 gbs is normal, a 250 GB hard drive has generally less space than 250 GBs, the actual size of the disk depends on the way used to format it.

XP SP 2 supposedly has no limitations on hard drive size so if you selected it to use the maximum available space during setup it "should" have picked up the entire drive. The only other thing I can think of is to make sure you are running the latest BIOS on your system, so you may want to check into that if you haven't already. I hate to say this but you may have to rerun the XP setup from your CD and make absolutely sure that the maximum partition size is selected and that it matches the size you expect it should.

Good luck and let me know how it goes. I'll continue to research and will let you know if I find anything of any help.

J