Windows 7 Leaded Win 7 and it took 116 Gig of hard drive space

[zophini]

Hello,

My daughter has a laptop with XP but it is Vista Compatible. I tried to load Win 7 and it would hang expanding files. By the way I was booting off the CD/DVD drive. I repartitioned the hard drive and formatted it during the installation process but it still was throwing an error message (error 0X80070001). I finally reloaded XP and then tried to install Win 7 again and it worked. The issue. When I looked at the hard drive usage and the install had used 116 gigs of hard drive space. At that point I had not loaded any files or programs.

When I got to the point to select where to load Win 7 I selected the hard drive which was partitioned. I was told I should have unpartioned the drive and that would have forced the install to partition the hard drive and then format it.

When I looked at each folder under the C:\ drive all of them combined did not add up to more than 25 Gig. Where is all that disk space being consumed? I really do not want to re-install win 7 because I would have to deal with reactivating the license. I am not sure if that is a big deal or not.



Thank you in advance,
Athan

 

[Saltgrass]

Do you show a Windows.old? Set the folder view option to view hidden. Do you show 2 folders with a $Windows.~xx?

In a tutorial somewhere, you could use the Disk Cleanup utility to remove these files, but they do contain stuff from previous installs, so you might want to keep them until you know you don't need anything.

 

[zophini]

Hello Saltgrass,

I did delete Windows.old but it was only about 8.3 Gigs. There are no $windows files and I did click on show all files and folders. Do you have any other ideas?

Thanks for your help,
Zophini

 

[Saltgrass]

Have you used Disk Management yet, type diskmgmt.msc in the start menu search box. From here, you can check your drives and format or partition, or change partition sizes, but it should give you a good picture of what is going on.