drive capacity

[#1]

I didn't  go into details because it is not solved as many would like it to be on their own  machines.  I still don't have recognition of the drives full capacity but looking in disk management on my XP it shows 297.96 GB out of a drive capacity of 320GB. It is solved in so far as  will settle for that .  Thank you for your help -  and to Samuria for the links..

[#2]

That's probably 100% correct.
Drive manufacturers have a habit of using K=1000, M=million, G=Billion whereas Windows is probably using 1024, 1,048,576 and 1,073,741,824. It makes the drives look bigger - marketing eh! 
320 Billion bytes is actually about 298GB.

[#3]

Aha, that's actually fairly easily explainable.
File sizes are recorded in Kilobytes and Megabytes.  One Kilobyte is 1024 bytes, and one Megabyte is 1024 Kilobytes and so on.
Hard drive manufacturers use a completely decimal representation, where one Kilobyte is referred to as 1000 bytes, and one Megabyte is referred to as 1000 Kilobytes and so on.
So, a hard drive manufacturer will quote their sizes as being 320Megabytes:  320*1000*1000*1000 = 320000000000 bytes
When the drive is formatted, it shows the representation as: 320000000000 / (1024*1024*1024) = 298.02 Gigabytes

[#4]

Snap (pay attention Barry!) 

[#5]

Oh ! unlike the portly Belgian detective, it seems my little gray cells are not  all they should be. I should have remembered the difference  that you point out.  So, It's good to know that I'm getting the full use of my drive.