Windows 7: where on the drive I can find those restore points

Are you shure you have 118GB of restore points. Sounds not right. Run this command vssadmin list shadowstorage - that will show you how much shadowstorage is currently allocated.

Ok, it is only 86 GB that were in use. My hard drive has 310 GB free out of 455 GB, but Windows, users, program files, etc. only use 59 GB total. TuneUp Utilities 2012 fixed the problem. None of the Windows 7 methods worked, and CCleaner could not find the problems either.

I am going to restore my computer from its image a fourth time. I would like to find a solution that does not require an outside piece of software as I feel the Windows 7 community would benefit from not having to purchase additional software to get a recovery to work.

So what did vssadmin list shadowstorage say ??

It listed my C: drive and my external H: drive where my recovery image is stored. It said that 0 Bytes were used by the C: drive and 2.985 GB were used by the H: drive for shadowstorage.

That all looks normal - doesn't it.

It does not. I know that I had 118 GB allocated for the system restore before creating the image. I also know that much of that space was taken up by updates/program installations since I first implemented the system restore points. I believe those restore points stayed on the disk after doing the recovery from the system image, but Windows is unaware of them for some reason.

Maybe you should reformat the drive and then put the image back on. It is somewhat mysterious.

After doing reformat and recovery, I tried going into system protection, c: configure, and deleting the restore points. I then turned off system restore, applied, and turned it back on and hit ok. I made a new restore point. My drive still shows only 307 GB free. It should show 393 GB based on shadowstorage saying 2.93 GB were allocated for that one restore point.

You might also use the tutorial below to see if something else may be using up the HDD space.

Hard Disk Space - Free Up and Recover

Alright, I found a solution. sfc /scannow fixes the issue when a recovery image is used to restore windows and restore points created previous to the image continue to take up space on the hard drive even after following the usual steps to remove restore points in Windows 7.