I am working on configuring my computer for multiple OSes, however I have somewhat of a problem.

I’m trying to plan out how I will size my partitions, unfortunately I can’t seem to figure out how much room I have to work with.

Since the drive is already partitioned I can't right-click it and see what the size of it is there, however the values I have so far are:

120 Gigabyte, What the box of the hard drive’s box says it to be

117240 MB, equal to 117.24 Gigabyte or 109.1883 Gibibyte (Given MB refers to Megabyte and not Mebibyte), What the
Device Manager in Windows XP says the capacity is when I go to properties on the hard drive

117240 MB, equal to 117.24 Gigabyte or 109.1883 Gibibyte (Given MB refers to Megabyte and not Mebibyte), the value I get when I add the size of my primary partition and the extended (light blue) on PartitionMagic

117239 MB, equal to 117.239 Gigabyte or 109.1873 Gibibyte (Again assuming MB stands for Megabyte), What PartitionMagic says the size of the drive is

117239.5 MB, you do the math, the resulting value of adding the size my primary partition and the sizes of my extended partitions in Partition Magic

51704 MiB, 50.4921875 Gibibyte, what FDISK from a windows 98 SE boot
disk says drive size is, also what Windows Recovery Terminal said. (I Know this value cant be right)

114.50GB, what ghost 2003 says the HDD size is (GB= Gibibyte or Gigabyte)

If anyone here knows of a program that can tell me the exact size of my hard drive, preferably in bytes (that will be least confusing), it would be much appreciated and if not:
Do you know anywhere else to check, or which value I should trust?

NOTE: I had though 1 kilobyte=1024 bytes however that seems to have changed or something, check these three sites, or do your own research
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte (use Google to translate this page from German, it works fine then)
http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/
http://pt3.hunter.cuny.edu/tutorials/computer_basic/memory.htm

I appoligize it i was supposed to seek a admin or mods approval before putting links in my post

Knowing the drive’s actual size is not as important as knowing how many partitions you would like to have. I have an 80gig HD (So it says on the outside cover) and I divided the amount shown during the initial setup by 4 because in my mind, I wanted four 20gig HD’s to work with. Now we all know technically that I didn’t get four 20 gig HD’s but rather more like 19,xxx gigs but that doesn’t matter. I got 4 partitions, which is what I really wanted in the first place.

If you have backed up your data, really planed out your design, covered all angles, listed all the pros and cons, start from the very beginning. I know this sounds crude but in the long run, my thoughts are that you will be happy with the out come of your future ventures with an array of OS’s

Just look at what it says on the hard drive itself, that hase to be the correct size, unless the sidk is no good. And about the bytes thing, I don"t know what the fuss is about,
1 TeraByte = 1024 GigaBytes
1 GigaByte = 1024 MegaBytes
1 MegaByte = 1024 KiloBytes
1 KiloByte = 1024 Bytes
1 Byte = 8 Bits.

Simple as that !

Hope you can solv you problem with that and what was sayed above. Best of luck.

A good thing to to do is to keep your OS's on partitions completely seperate from your apps and documents. Running XP, I have 10 GB for it and Office, then I have 5 GB for data, 10 GB for my apps installed to the same partition as the apps are. This way if one of your OS's craps out, you just have to reinstall or better, have it ghosted elsewher on your HD or onto removable media. Also, I have a 2GB swap file which all my OS's use on a seperate hard drive. Hope this gives you some other ideas.

The exact size should not matter since you are using partition magic to partition it, so you need to work with partition magic's number.

The problem with putting your apps on a seperate disk from your OS is that if the OS gives up and you have to reinstall it, or even ghost an older image of it, then your programms are lost to because half of the stuf that composes a program gets put into C:\Windows\System32 and so on, so you'll have to reinstall half the programs anyway ! So realy I don't see the point. If you can give me a better reason then go ahead !

I believe the thinking behind that is though the programs wouldnt run as is, you would still have any thing extra addes, log and files, and most importantly, saved data which could be difficult to recover

I normaly do seperate system files & progrmas via paritions though I have never had an OS fail, w/ my Multi-boot setup I decided not to bother w/ that because it would be a pain to have that many partitions

Seems to me that for a multi-boot situation, having multiple partitions on which to install the operating systems, then having one partition in a universally-readable filesystem that contains your documents and such would be the best way to go.

As for your question on the size of your drive, keep in mind that manufacturers normally sell drives marketed as one size but that are in actuality a good bit smaller than the size on the box. For instance, mine was sold as 80GB, but it actually works out to be 74.5GB. Kinda dirty of them, really, they shafted me by 5.5GB. Before that I had a 40GB one (bless its little read/write heads) that was 37.6GB.

Why is it that you want to know an exact figure, anyway?

I wanted to know so I could write up on paper exactly how I I was going to partition it

and btw I found a way that I believe to be the closest way to figure out exactly the size of a hdd, however I forget exactly where it was, but it was by running some scan on the hdd (I believe it was CHEKDISK) off of either a boot medium I have here or else it was MS recovery console, but it gave the size of everthing once it ran I beleive even on of them would be the equivilent of the unformated compacity

They say subtract about 7% off the marked size. This is becuase hdd makers round 1 gig at 1000 mb instead of 1024 like it should be.