I'm building a new system and I've got a question on formatting the hard drives. They are 80GB and 160GB. The 80GB drive is the master and the 160GB drive is the slave and is used for data storage only; it is seldom accessed. During the course of building the PC, I had the OS on the 160GB drive and in the end the 160GB drive was formatted; the OS now resides on the 80GB drive. Nothing has been placed on the 160GB drive, however, as I look at the properties of the drive it shows 69.2MB being used. My understanding is that 8MB would be more like it, for maybe the backup feature of XP.

How do I format this drive and get the whatever off of it?

 

You can't. The OS uses that space for volume information, etc. You have 160GB, don't worry about 70MB. There is nothing you can do to remove the 70mb

 

I had suspected that XP would do this, but 70MB seems excessive. Anyone know why? I know, 70MB is just a drop in the bucket compared to the 160GB available, but I'm curious as to why. I'd buy the 8MB but the 70MB makes me wonder.