New
#1
Random Gain of 9-10 Gigabytes, Want to Know if Assumptions Correct
I have a 320 GB hard-drive with several bad sectors that I was going to repair with HDD Regenerator, but I heard that it sometimes has bad results so I decided to clone the drive before using it. Unfortunately, Clonezilla failed and managed to damage an unknown amount of files on the drive shortly after starting the cloning process. Windows stopped starting up properly, not recognizing my account's administrator status and not loading any programs at all upon login, including explorer.exe. After several failed attempts at fixing the drive with Chkdsk and Startup Repair, I finally decided to re-install Windows on another hard-drive.
However after I re-installed, I noticed that the free space on the older drive had suddenly increased from about 44 GB to about 53 GB. In checking my personal files it seems the majority of them are there. However, the Windows folder on that drive is only 14 GB. Coupled with the bugs I experienced, and the fact that the minimum hard-drive space needed for W7 64-bit is 20 GB, my theory is that at least 6 GB of original W7 system files disappeared, while an additional 3 GB from System Restore points, various programs integrated into the system like C++ Redistributable and .NET Framework, Updates, the WinSXS folder, temporary/miscellaneous files (though probably few since I use C-Cleaner often) and etc. were lost as well.
Is this plausible based on what I've described? I haven't gone into the system folders often and I'm not sure if what I'm saying makes sense.