120GB drive would appear as about 111GB in your case. to blow away the restore partitons (the recovery boot and image partitions), you can use windows drive manager or another way is to use a wipe utility like killdisc if you have partitons that cannot be removed in windows....also choosing to delete all partitions during xp or vista setup will work too...and any recovery disc should have option to delete all partitions. (stolen shamelessly from wiki) Since the early 2000s most consumer hard drive capacities are grouped in certain size classes measured in gigabytes. The exact capacity of a given drive is usually some number above or below the class designation. Although most manufacturers of hard disk drives and flash-memory disk devices define 1 gigabyte as 1000000000bytes, the computer operating systems used by most users usually calculate size in gigabytes by dividing the total capacity in bytes (whether it is disk capacity, file size, or system RAM) by 1073741824. This distinction can be a cause of confusion, as a hard disk with a manufacturer-rated capacity of 400 gigabytes may be reported by the operating system as only 372 GB large, depending on the type of report.