Missing Gigs After Installation?

Hello to the W7F community! I learned of your website when I found this tutorial. YouTube - How to Clean Install Windows 7 (Part 1 of 2) Thanks very much for that.

So I installed Win 7 and everything went fine. After it was installed though, I noticed something strange. When I go into My Computer and click on the hard drive icon, it tells me that I have 235 GB available out of 298 GB.

The Windows files are about 13 GB. The program files are about 1 GB. There's an Acer file that is about 1 GB, and some various folders that might equal 1 GB max. There's nothing to speak of in Documents or Downloads, only a few MB. There's less than 20 GB total used on the disk. So that leaves approximately 40 GB that are unaccounted for.

I went into the Disk Managementsectionto find out if there was a partition there, but it doesn't show any. It just shows the primary disk (Disk 0 with 298 GB) and the DVD drive (CD Drive 0). I also read up on your thread here. Partition or Volume - Delete
I also checked this before I did the installation because I wanted to make sure that there wasn't a partition there to begin with. It was the same.

So if I don't have a partition, I have no idea where these missing GB could be. It's probably just something that I'm just not realizing, or overlooking, but I'd like to be able to use those GBs in the future. I also want to make sure that all the previous information is off this computer.

This is an Acer laptop. 298 GB. 3 GB memory. AMD Athlon 64x2 Processor. I'm using Win 7 Professional.

Can somebody tell me why this is, or where these missing GB could be? Thanks in advance.

Have you set folder options to view hidden and system files?

I'm not sure that matters, but it might.

System restore and hibernation files take up quite a bit of space as well and they may not show.

There is an app called WinDirStat that you can download that should give you greater insight into what is taking up space.

OK, thanks. I ran WinDirStat and see that the System Volume Information is 42 GB. So there are the GBs I couldn't find. What is System Volume Information? I see that it has a black box next to it in WinDir, instead of a folder icon. Is that for the system restore, hibernation, etc.? Is it normal for it to take up over 40 Gigs of space? I haven't had a new computer for about 2 years, and this is my first time using Win 7, but that just seems like a ridiculous amount of space to me.

I set the folder options to show hidden and system files but I still can't see the hiberfile.

If the cmd command is powercfg -h off, can it be turned back on easily? How exactly do I enter that as a command prompt in Win 7? Is there a way to do it in the Win 7 control panel?

I don't know how to make a screenshot of a program. Can you tell me how to do that?

Thanks

You can paste that command right into a command prompt window. Then hit the enter key.

You might have to use an "elevated" command prompt aka command prompt run as administrator. I don't recall.

You can turn it back on as easily as you turned it off.

"powercfg -h on" - Google Search

Thanks. Yes, that's the problem I had before. I don't know how to run the "elevated" command prompt aka command prompt run as administrator. It gives me the error message saying as much. I thought I would automatically be the admin. Can you tell me how to do that?

Thanks

Right click the command. you should see "run as administrator" as a menu choice.

You should get in the habit of investigating right clicks constantly. It's a very important part of Windows.

Right click in the black command box? I don't know what you mean. I'm sorry. Also, how do I even find the Hiberfile to find out how much it's using?

Thanks