How to clean Hard drive in WinXP??

[pvanosta]

My friend just (misguidedly) bought a HP 1918 PC with WinXP home pre-loaded.
Not only does he hate WinXP Home, but the machine also didn't come with any restore disks.
H formatted the drive and put Win2K on it. So far so good, except: his 30GB drive is only showing 27 GB. Even after using BLAST, FDISK and re-formatting, the drive will not access the extra 3 GB.
HP of course refuses all support.
Any ideas how to REALLY wipe this drive fully?
Thanks.

[3DMike]

I dont think you have actually lost any space. It could be to do with the way that different people measure Capacity.

Remember 1Gb=1024Mb=1024Kb, not 1000. So if the manufacturer says you have got for example 30Gb, you could well see this as less if you count 1Gb as 1000Mb.

Or it could be the format you are using? Do you format with FAT16/32 or NTFS?

[RedDeathDrinker]

See answer above. FAT32 reported a 20.2Gb drive for me, NTFS an 18.6Gb drive........

Still loads of space (never used more than 6 Gigs) so I don't worry........

[3DMike]

Nice to see my answer being backed up by such an esteemed member!;)