I lost 50 gigs of hard space with no explanation

before installing windows you have to format a hard drive. when you buy a hard drive they tell you their size lets say 500 gb but they don't include how big the drive will be AFTER formatting. The formatting takes some space because it basically sets up your empty hard drive like a yellow book giving every empty sector an assigned number (book page). With this Windows can see all the sectors and it knows where it can save files (looking at pages in a book analogy)

hi there

please dont post your email address unless you want a ton of spam

do you have a lot of memory?

the more ram you have the more space the pagefile and the hyberfil.sys file will take up

came to about 32gb for me

if you lower the pagefile to 1gb and delete the hyberfil.sys file you will get a load of the space back

plus as alvine said formatting loses some space as well

First, edit your original post to remove your email address (unless you really like spam).

Go into Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Disk Management and you'll be able to see all of your partitions and filesystem info. There may be some unused space on your HDD. There could alos be a recovery partition.

If this doesn't clear up your concerns., go into your Device Manager and look at the info for your Disk drives to see if the model matches what you originally had installed.

Good luck!

i dont know the full details but
a 500 gigabyte hard drive has 512,000 megabytes

but a 500 gigabit hardrive only has 480,000 megabytes


then you lose some because of how the hard drive is formated e.g.


read this to understand

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/04/01/the...



bassically because of how hard drives used to be with 512byte sectors then ecc (error correcting code) for each sector


now with 4k drives it has 4000byte sectors then ecc for each


this wont make any difference in hard drive size but what it does do is explain why you dont get the size stated on the drive because technically you do its just not useable.


usually when we tell people you have a 500gb hard drive is just the size it says on the box and you will get a bit under that

Just to be clear - you say "less than when he started" - does that mean he upgraded you from an old version of windows? if so - he may have done it keeping your old windows info - which will ofc take up a fair amount of space... along with the win7 install itself.

So can you give more info about what you had at the start... what you had at the end... and what was done in the middle?

Cheers