HDD formating & winXP question

[Wolfram]

I built a system for the first time and have it up and running. Next step is formating the drive and installing winXp.
Question is how do I get the drive formating done inorder to put winXP on it? Will the win XP disc do it for me?
I put the disc in and booted from the cdrw, got to the screen that says I have 76 gigs of partitioned space and do I want to partition it? The drive is 80 gigs though and winXP seems to only see 76 gigs. Where is the 4 gigs? Is it in another partition somewhere? Shouldn't be, as the drive is new.
So can someone please help me through this first time experience for a relative newb. Thanks!

 

[nihil]

the os sees 1MB as 1000
and the hd sees 1MB as 1024

that would account for the "missing" space.

 

[Wolfram]

That would account for about 2 gigs I guess... drive says max LBA capacity is 80026.
Anyway......regarding the Hard drive formatting, do I just let XP set it up, or do I need to format using fdisk from my win98 boot disc?
thanks

 

[nihil]

the xp disk will allow you to partition and format the drive.

 

[Wolfram]

thanks much.....I'm trying to make it harder than it is.

 

[Bglad]

76G on an 80G drive is perfectly normal

 

[Wolfram]

thanks, I finally understand. It's all semantics.