partitioning hard drive for maximum space

i'm setting up my hard drive and have the problem of having free space left over when i partition it because the manufacturer measures a gigabyte by 1000 bytes and my drive actually is being formatted by 1024 bytes or something like that. here's the thread about it, http://www.antionline.com/showthread...16#post821416. well i've decided to break it into two partitions, one for the operating system and the other for storage space and i was wondering if there was a way to work this so that I wouldnt have any space left over by specifying the partition sizes very precisely(with lots of decimal places), is that possible?

Is really depend what software you use to created your partition. Some programme have to work by block, some not.

Jeez Slinky :
160 GB HDD.

I wouldn't worry about losing a MB or two :)
Seriously, it's better to just get the partitions done and dusted, and get down to some quality PC time :D

I'm running with two 40GB HDD's.
One is for dual boot Win2KPro / XPPro + data.
Other is for images of each OS, plus music and a couple of games, and I've got a heap of GB left over, you can have them if you want :p

I think fdisk would be up for the job if I understand what you want..

Different filesystems allow for different blocksizes..

not realy to do with partitioning software, it has nothing to do with the difference between manufacturers decimal Megabytes and computers HEXADECIMAL megabytes..by the way you end up with the same amount of memory just use different fingers to count it..

Initially I suspect it is an issue with NTFS like reserved space for the filesystem or as mentioned to do with the the block sizes again to do with the file system..isnt ntfs 4kb blocks? .. hmm address table .. every hdd I ever partitioned and formatted under NTFS has been 8Mb spare.. .. hmm should do a google .. nah too lazy.. i'll live with that question for another year

i've done this with cfdisk and it always has 8 mb left over when i try to make a single 160 gig partition. i'm going to be using ntfs for the OS partition and FAT32 for the storage partition. also, its not so much that i really need that 8 mb of space as it bothers the hell out of me that i cant use it ;). i've partitioned my 30 gig drive with a single ntfs type partition several times and there was no space left over, are you sure that's happend on every comptuer undertaker?

anybody know what partition type i should make with fdisk or cfdisk if i'm going to write a FAT32 filesystem onto the drive? there's w95 FAT32, w95 FAT32 (LBA), w95 Ext'd FAT32 (LBA). i'm not sure which one to use or even if one of those is correct.