Lost 60 gigs; need help finding them

[Stromgarde]

I did a fresh install of windows 7 onto a new PC last night, but something odd is happening. I have a 300GB WD Velociraptor HDD, and while I know that 300GB isn't really 300GB, I would expect that when it says that 80 gigs are used, 80 gigs are actually being used, but I can only account for 20. I checked and there aren't any partitions eating up space, and the recycle bin is empty. What's going on?

[The Stig]

Did you count the hidden files too? Including the system-hidden files (not just the simple hidden files).

Is System Restore on?

[Stromgarde]

I only had hidden folders displayed at first; Hidden system files accounted for up to 42.7GB. How do I delete system restore points and free up that space?

[The Stig]

I have not had an opportunity to use Windows 7 but I assume it'll be the same as XP and Vista.

You can turn it off in the Services Panel, but as I said, I have not looked into 7 yet. But in most cases it's safe to turn off but for more novice users the feature is actually more handy.

However, I do not know (as you said, it's a fresh install) if System Restore is taking up so much space already. It's possible, but I'm not sure. However, I also read the initial Windows 7 installation takes up a lot more space than Vista.

Are you able to see what those hidden system files are (although unlikely, they're hidden like that for a reason? Otherwise we've somewhat recovered your 60 gigs, right? Assuming the file check size came up correctly and you just substracted the remaining for the 42.7gb.

[rezn0r]

start / run cleanmgr.exe

click Clean up system files in the bottom left

click More Options tab on the top right

the bottom option will let you delete all but the most recent restore points

other options in this app might help you clean up more room

good luck

[Lucki]

Can you open up Computer Management and take a picture of what's there? Windows 7 apparently creates a hidden partition, and your missing space may be there (although according to this link, it should only be about 200MB).

[Stromgarde]

Clearing out the superfluous restore points freed up the missing data (Despite being a clean install over Vista, apparently it kept a shadow copy of windows.old after I deleted it); all space is now accounted for, thanks!

[fishstix]

Yeh, unless you hit the format drive button, a clean install just means you didn't do a software upgrade through Vista.

kinda relevant, but random info: HD makers are allowed to release drives up to 10% below advertised size.

[Stromgarde]

I had installed Vista temporarily until Win7 had shipped; I had hit the option that said 'don't keep anything' but apparently that still backs up your old files into a folder called 'windows.old' that is also backed up via system restore or something. At any rate, I can account for all used space on my disk now, and all is as it should be.

[The Stig]

Ah that's nice to know, I'll keep that in mind when I perform the upgrade.

[Deimos]

You already solved the problem, but for other people with similar issues: this is my favorite program for finding "lost" hard drive space: WinDirStat. The way it visually shows you what's taking up space is beautiful, I've found a ton of wasted space with it many times, when I forgot about some big files that I no longer needed.

However, I'm not sure if it works on Windows 7. It should, but no guarantees.

[bungiefan]

Yeh, unless you hit the format drive button, a clean install just means you didn't do a software upgrade through Vista.

kinda relevant, but random info: HD makers are allowed to release drives up to 10% below advertised size.

It's not that. It's that hard drives are measured by the manufacturers in metric, while your computer measures in binary.

1.5 TB in metric is 1.5 trillion bytes. 1.5 TB in binary measure is 1.5*2^40 (1,649,267,441,664) bytes. That leaves you with a discrepancy of 149,267,441,664 bytes, which the computer reads as about 100 GB. That's why a lot of open source software like torrent programs and Linux use KiB, MiB, GiB, and TiB (binary kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte, and terabyte, also known as kibibyte, mebibyte, gibibyte, and tebibyte) as the unit of size now instead of KB, MB, GB, and TB. The government only requires that the metric measure be fulfilled, and the computers apply metric labels to binary measure. To a manufacturer, 1 KB is 1000 (10^3) bytes, but to a computer it is 1024 (2^10) bytes, while 1 MB is 10^6 to a manufacturer and 2^20 to a computer, and the difference in what the drive really is and what the computer says it is gets exponentially farther apart the larger the drive gets because of this.

If you want the drive to show up the same to the computer as the label says, manufacturers need to start using the binary measure so they read the same as the computers do, or vice versa, and the computers use a logic that makes sense in their environment.