hi, i googled alot but couldnt find a solution, hope someone can help me^^

i had a 120gb hdd which was devided into 3 partition (20gb, 40gb and 60gb) with windows xp pro sp2.

i wanted to repartition everything so i what i did was boot from the windows cd, delete all partition.. as i was setting the size for the partitions i noticed that 10gb was missing.. since i didnt know what to do i continued with installing xp on a partition.. after installing i looked into disk management but the missing 10gb wasnt showing.. so how can i get the missing space back?

Your "120gb" hdd probably isnt 120gb anyway

a) hard drive sizes are a few gigs out, its just the way they get made
b) some people call a gigabyte 1000 mb when its really 1024mb. Thats why a 120gb hdd is only like 117gb.

yes i know that my hdd is not exactly 120gb but before i deleted my partitions i had more than after deleting

has it got bad sectors?

what do you actually mean, do you mean if there is or was something that didnt work properly or something like that? if thats what you mean, then no i didnt have any problems and now i also havent encoutered any problems yet..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_sector

yesterday i did a checkdisk on one of my partition, no bad sector.. is there a way to checkdisk the xp partition?
today i installed linux, the spaces that were shown were altogether 117gb.. in windows it says 60gb for one partition but during the installation the partition showed 62 or 64gb.. so what does that mean?

That may be your "missing" space (just allocated elsewhere), also when you format a disk you "loose" space (it is still there, just used for formatting). Best of luck~Mav.

does that mean that i will always loose space whenever i format even when i havent used the formatted partition.. is the amount of space i loose everytime the same or does it depend how big the partition is or how much data is on the partition?

and i guess there is no way to restore that lost space or is there?

Yes, you will always loose space when you format (however it's not cumulative). I believe (not sure) that the space used for formatting does not depend upon the drive or partition size. Hope this helps.