How to retrieve the missing hard disk space in Win7/Win8 computer?

Why does the hard disk display no space that the manufacturer claims?

If you have ever noticed the hard drive, USB flash drive or other storage device, you will find that the display space is always not as big as claimed. .

For hard disk manufacturers, 1KB = 1000Bytes, 1MB = 1000KB, 1GB = 1000MB. That is to say, if a hard disk is said to be 500GB, it actually contains 500*1000*1000*1000=500,000,000,000 Bytes. The manufacturer's 500GB hard drive size is calculated this way.

However, the manufacturer of RAM radix to be used is not 1000, but 1024. The memory conversion mechanism is like this: 1KB=1024Bytes, 1MB=1024KB, 1GB=1024MB. Let's reverse the calculation of 500,000,000,000 Bytes in 1024 to calculate how many GB.

500,000,000,000/(1024*1024*1024)=465.66GB

In Windows systems, the data conversion unit is always 1024, which contradicts the hardware manufacturer's 1000. , causing a deviation in the conversion. This will lead to the gap of 35GB.

Why is the remaining space displayed on your computer incorrect?

If you notice the amount of free space on your hard drive partition, you may feel a bit strange. If you want to delve into it, right click on the C drive and you will see the disk space marked as used. In the image below, the space used contains 279GB of files.

However, when you circle all the C disk files (including all hidden files and system files), and right-click and select Properties. You will find that the size of the space occupied by all of these folders does not match what you just saw. Looking at the figure below, we learned that all the files occupy 272GB of disk space, but the actual disk space has already used 279GB, so where is the difference of 7GB?

It turned out that certain types of files are not displayed in Explorer's. These invisible files include system restore points and previous versions of some files. If you want to see how much space these invisible files occupy in each partition, you can run the command prompt to see what happens. It is important to note that you must be running as an administrator. Specific operation is as follows:

1. Win + R open operation, open a command prompt type cmd

2. Enter command vssadmin list shadowstorage

we can see About 9GB of used space (Used Shadow Copy Storage space) is occupied by these invisible files, and the above mentioned is more than 7GB, but we are roughly estimated by rounding, so this calculation should be just right. of.

Let's talk about hidden partitions

Usually the computer itself will contain a hidden restore partition, you can use the system's own disk manager to view.

As shown in the following figure, almost 11GB of hard disk space is allocated to a hidden restore partition.

In this article, because everyone on the hard disk space missing a clear understanding of it.