Understanding the YaST partitioner

I’ve set up a machine to dual boot Windows XP and openSUSE 11.1. I’m new to this and while the installation appears to have worked (I can boot into both OSes now) I’m a little confused about the resulting drive sizes.

I installed XP first and in that process I created 3 partitions (40GB–39.something actually–for XP, 40GB for linux and the remaining space was reserved for file sharing b/n the systems).

When installing openSUSE, I used the custom partition option to allocate space for both a swap partition and the root partition (with the sum of the two equaling, I thought, 40GB.

The weird thing that occurred after all was said and done was that the Windows partition GREW by 2GB. Does anyone know why this might occur? What might I have done wrong? Thanks for helping a noob!

That growth you saw in Windows or in Linux?
From what OS you saw that partition size increased?

I’m not sure exactly, but AFAIK it’s got something to do with counting 1000 for a kB or, as it should be, 1024.
If you put in a 250GB disk, size reported by manufacturor and Windows is 250GB. Linux reports about 232GB, which is the real size. So there’s no way you’re gonna store 240GB on such a disk. But that would explain the other way round.

But it’s not something to worry about. Only when your disk is 98% full…or not