I have a 250GB Hard Drive. My Software at install will include:
Windows Media Center 2005(PRO), Acronis True Image 9.0, Acronis
Privacy Expert Suite 9.0, Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0, Diskeeper
Pro 9.
Number of Questions:2
1) At time of reinstall I will format the drive then delete the
current partitions. Then I will have 238359.50 MB of unpartitioned
space. The difference is 11640.5 MB. As I understand it each GB is
1000 MB, which would mean that in this calculation I would have
11.6405 GB being used for Windows install, Controllers  for the SATA,
and BIOS. Am I right or wrong so far?
2) So what I want to do is start the partition on C: drive as the
Active directory with Windows and Partition it so that I would be able
to set up a restore partition on a separate drive with the ability to
do incremental backups. Question: How much space do I partition C:
Drive So that I can have at a minimum of 50 GB on the second
Partition?

Just as an FYI, I know that I can use Aconis to have an image on the
same drive but this disables the defragmentation ability due to this
being a hidden extension. Then when Diskeeper Defragmenter is install
it takes on a new life in the Management Console.  So combining the
two programs on the same partition is a problem which was my other
reason for the second partition.

I know this should be simple math but I have yet to find an IT who
would commit to and answer.

P.S. I know I am only setting the price at $10.  I really can not
afford that right now do to a major illness in my family and a serious
car accident 2 months ago and now a very lean Christmas.  So my
computer is my best friend and escape from my real world.

First off, check your hard drive - most hard drives will say something
like 250 Gigabytes (1 gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes)... Problem is,
that some operating systems try to use base 10 and others use 2...

Remember that everything is based on a bit with two possible states....
so for an operating sytem, 2^10th power is 1024 bytes... so some
people call 1024 bytes a kilobyte - others use the 1000 bytes.... Go
on to the Megabyte is it 1,000,000 bytes or 2^20th or 1,048,576 bytes?
 and so on.

So if you have 250,000,000,000 bytes is that 250 gigabytes or 232.830
gigabytes  (based on 2^30th bytes is a gig)?

Once you get past that confusion and make sure everyone is on the same
page, lets talk about the partitioning.

In the old days, doing anything with a partition required completely
formatting the drive.  Now there is software to help with that... With
things like Partition magic you can add, or drop partitions on the
fly.

Now on to some other issues:

1) In most computers, the BIOS is stored on a chip on the mother
board... It is NOT on the hard drive.

2) The windows install... Unless I am missing something in your plan,
the Windows install is typically in drive C: - If you change that
partition or format it, it is gone... Your wording seems to imply that
you will still have windows if you format the C:
 
I can't give this as an answer, but I believe the overhead of
partitions is part of the boot partition so assuming you want exactly
50GB  in a second partition, you should be left with


Does your hd have 2^30th *250 bytes or 250,000,000,000 and do you want
50,000,000,000 or 2^30th *50 bytes on the other partition?

(2^30 * 250) - 50,000,000,000 = 218,435,456,000  OR
(2^30 * 250) - (2^30 *50) =   = 214,748,364,800 OR
250,000,000,000 - 50,000,000,000 = 200,000,000,000 OR
250,000,000,000 - (2^30 * 50) = 196,312,908,800 OR

It just depeds on how you quantify the terms...