Solved windows new installation used more than 80 GB of disk space - help

[linuxgirl]

Hello,

I installed windows 7 professional 64 bit on a western digital disk that has 160GB. When the installation was done, I went to My Computer and saw that it used more than 80GB of disk space. I enabled hidden folders and measured everything that was in the computer - all files combined including system and windows file do not add up to more than 16GB. So how come it is showing that half the disk is in use?

I looked for windows.old file thinking maybe this is what taking space, but I found nothing.

Also, I formatted the disk before I installed windows7 and deleted everything, so supposedely there shouldnt have been any left overs from previous installations (and indeed there isnt).

Any suggestions as to what is taking up so much space and how to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Brink]

Hello linuxgirl, and welcome to Seven Forums.

Go ahead and post back with a screenshot of your Disk Management window to see if anything there may show any missing hard drive space.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/274797-disk-management-post-screen-capture-image.html
​

In addition, you might also check using step 1 and any others in the tutorial below to see what it shows.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/129976-hard-disk-space-free-up-recover.html
​

Hope this helps for now,
Shawn

 

[linuxgirl]

Hi Brink,

Please see the attachements that you asked. I could try to clean the disk, but I dont understand how come the sum of all files and folders is about 16GB and it shows as if half the disk is being used. So I dont know what could be cleaned?

Thanks!

 

[linuxgirl]

Update:

I used WinDirStat and it found that the files taking up all the space are pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys.

Is it SAFE to delete these two files? Will it do any harm?

What are they for?

Thanks!!!!

 

[linuxgirl]

ok, problem solved, thanks to brink for pointing me in the windirstat direction. i disabled hibernation, deleted the hiberfil.sys and set the pagefile.sys size to 1GB - thanks!

 

[Brink]

Great news. Odd that they would be that large by default after a clean install though. How much RAM do you have?

 

[linuxgirl]

Yes, it is indeed odd - I have a lot of RAM, which makes it even stranger, but the important part is that the problem is solved, thanks to your help Thanks a lot again!

 

[Brink]

That would be why then. If you have a lot RAM, these files will be large to match.