Serious amount of lost hard drive space

On a clean install, the drive (including hidden files) reports windows has used 11.3Gb. However, on Drive Properties, it reports 63.3Gb of space already used up.

I have run the install from wiped SSD and SATA, with RAID switched on and with it off - same result every time. Can anyone suggest WHY 50Gb has just GONE!

Checked for basics like quota etc, but this is immediately after windows install, no changes made by user.

Thanks in advance.

 

How much RAM do you have? Hibernate will reserve as much RAM as you have, page file will too. So with 16GB RAM you could lose 32GB storage space. This can be circumvented by turning off hibernate and setting a minimum pagefile size.

To check just open Windows Explorer (Win+E), tap the Alt key to bring up the menus, choose Tools/Folder Options/View tab. Deselect "Hide protected operating system files". Click Ok, it will give you the idiot window saying that you could royally screw up your computer if you delete any system files (and they're right).

Open up your root C drive and there should be two files listed: pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys. Check out their file sizes.

Alternatively you could just download and run TreeSize Free which will give you an overview of what system files are consuming what space.

 

To get the overview, I always use FreeCommander - freeware file manager

Also got that easy to use search facility, f.ex. search for all files over 10mb and see if you find some obvious culprits eating up space, to be moved or deleted or whatever needs to be done.

Attachment: a w7 ultimate on c: shown in commander.

 

try a normal disc cleanup in system tools.
that found 58gb after a clean install of vista.
2.2gb hybernate file and 56gb windows.old folder which is the previous instalation with all folders,software and games.