the hard drive thats 60 gb shows 55.7 gb as total space.
could that 4.3 gb went on partitioning??
is that normal?

where are you seeing these numbers..

in windows explorer or from fdisk?

and

is this a new HDD or was it preinstalled with your notebook?

there could be a hidden partition created by the OEM with backup files

As misleading as it is, hard drive manufacturers usually use rounded numbers for hard drive capacities.

1000 bytes = 1 MB instead of 1024 bytes = 1 MB
1000 MB = 1 GB instead of 1024 MB = 1 GB

So, that hard drive is probably 60000000 bytes (57.22 GB), instead of 62914560 bytes (60 GB). As far as where the rest of that space went, that may have went to partition information, or there may be a small hidden partition on the drive, or something else along those lines. It is normal, unfortunately.

Edit: Yeah, I totally forgot about Kilobytes in there, didn't I? That's probably where the rest of that space went.

All hard disks are like that, it's because 1Mb = 1024Kb & 1Kb = 1024 bytes. A 60Gb drive is 60,000,000,000 bytes - which is actually only 56Gb.

Thanks a lot everyone!!
its a preformatted hdd on a new notebook with software already installed.
and the number is as seen in windows explorer.

yeah it sucks that hard drive manufacturers use the decimal system in advetising their products instead of thi binary system that computers use. I could only imagine what would happen if RAM were sold like that.

Don't say that!!! damn, you just gave the clue to the manufacturers...

About the units, it goes like that, iirc:

-> byte - megabyte - gigabyte - terabyte - petabyte - exabyte. Every step is 1024 times bigger, or just 2^10.

-> bit - kilobit - megabit - gigabit... every step 1000 (10^3) times bigger.

bit x8 = byte.