Dual boot Mint/Windows: Lost 8 GBs on Windows side

Question

Many dual boot tutorials talk about freeing up space through the disk manager in Windows before attempting a dual boot with Linux --

Out of curiosity I decided to skip this step and just run the Mint installer and let it decide what to do ( Mint 12 / Win 7 ). Results? I'm missing 8 gigabytes of space on the Windows side. Not complaining here ...I deliberately took the risk to see what would happen.

So what's your explanation for why this happened and how you would recover the space?

This is a Toshiba laptop. Started with 3 primary partitions. There is the Toshiba recovery partition, the Win 7 recovery partition and the Win 7 OS partition. Is this due to the MBR primary partition limitation? An issue with parted?

UPDATE df -h shows the following:

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda5             108G  3.7G   99G   4% /
udev                  898M  4.0K  898M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 362M  1.1M  361M   1% /run
none                  5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none                  905M  136K  905M   1% /run/shm

Using the disk utility in Mint I see the following:

• System: 1.6 GB NTFS
• Tl1...etc: 119 GB NTFS
• Extended: 119 GB
• 117 GB ext4
• 1.9 GB swap
• HDDRECOVERY: 10 GB NTFS

So the drive is 250 GB -- Windows 7 Disk Manager shows the following:

• Disk 0 Basic - 232.89 GB

Divided as follows:

• 1.46 GB Active, Recovery - Simple - Basic
• 111.21 GB NTFS Boot - Simple - Basic
• 109.10 GB Primary - Simple - Basic
• 1.80 GB Primary - Simple - Basic
• 9.32 GB Primary - Simple - Basic

So if we subtract the 10 GB recovery partition we get 240 GB. What happened to 7 approx. Gigabytes?

UPDATE 2
My question has been answered -- thanks. So now I owe an explanation. I am researching this for a new Linux user who'd like a dual-boot config but is having issues with all the tutorials suggesting 'shrinking' partitions in Windows first. Why bother? It's an added step and it's way easier without. Can anyone offer an explanation as to what the advantage is -- ? Seems like a wasted and confusing step for would-be converts.

Answer 1

You are suffering from classic base10 vs base2 confusion. Windows is showing units of GiB ( 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes ) and the gnome disk utility is showing GB ( 1,000,000,000 bytes ).

Answer 2

Windows is displaying its output in gibibytes (2^30 bytes), whereas the disk utility is displaying its output in gigabytes (10^9 bytes). The actual space reported is the same, just in different units.