Our ninth Q & A of the week comes from Brian via the PCstats reader feedback page . If you have a question you need answered right away, try our friendly forums for help too.

Q: Please can you explain how to rid myself of Knoppix 3.7 on my drive? I tried it to see what it was like and now theres a section of the drive which I believe is called the boot sector I can't seem to get rid of. Theres 17Gb that Ive lost, I have two 120 Gb Western Digital Special Edition Drives so 240 Gb Total in Raid array but Computer says 223 Gb Total!! Any ideas of how to regain this amount?

A: The bad news is that you can't regain the lost space... The good news is you never lost it in the first place. 223GB is about the correct amount of storage you can expect from a twin-120GB drive RAID array, due to the way that hard drive manufacturers advertise their products.

A Gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes according to Windows XP and every other operating system, but all major hard disk manufacturers advertise their drive's capacity as if a gigabyte was exactly 1,000,000,000 bytes. This means that while your Western Digital drives say they have a capacity of 120GB, Windows says they have a capacity of around 112MB (since 120*1,000,000,000/1,073,741,824 = 111.8). With this taken into account, your 223GB RAID drive sounds just right.

Knoppix should not leave any significant trace of itself on your system, and certainly not 17GB worth.