I really rely on GOG forum to help with pc (or any) issues so I thought I'd try and see if someone could kindly help.

I have a HDD with a capacity of 750 GBs although I'm aware that it never displays the full capacity in a drives properties. However, over time the HDD capacity has been dropping and now it displays just over 581GB. Partition 39GB and F: 14

I'm running Win 7 x64 and would like to establish whether there's a way of restoring the capacity (not used space) back to around the 700GB mark. I have one partition that has 15GB, so I'm still missing about 180GB or so. Also, I hope I won't need to delete files or uninstall programmes unless it's close to being a last resort

Does anyone have any advise on how I can reclaim (for want of a better word) the total HDD space?

Thanks.

edit: correct disk space info as it wasn't accurate.

Right Click on Computer, click Manage. In the Computer Management screen, go to Storage->Disk Management and see if Disk # (which should be about 698GB) has any unallocated space. If all the space is in partitions, then there isn't any free space, and it's quite likely that your disk is dying.

Did you really lose 200GB? I've neer seen such thing.. O_o
If so, I don't dare imagine the SMART readings..

Sorry, I'm about 100GB out - In disk management in the bottom window is says: OEM partition 39GB, Recovery 14GB and C (OS) 581GB totalling 634GB. Is that expected as it still seems short to me.

I've edited the original post.

Is the disk identified on the left as 698GB disk, or as a 634GB one? If the capacity on the left is similar to the total of the partitions, then you should be checking your disk for bad sectors and so on. If the capacity on the left is significantly higher then the total of partitions, something is missing.

Thanks for the reply and help.

The capacities displayed above are in order from left to right. The total is just me adding each up to total 634GB.

See the image attached in post 6. To the far left there is That is the part I'm asking about. Over there Disk Management reports on the disk itself, not the partitions it has, so that is the maximum capacity of your disk. What is that number?

Windoze can easily eat a large chunk through the "restore point" thing too.

If you want, you can go to:

Control Panel - Create a Restore Point - then click Configure & then Delete.

That`ll delete all old restore points which is safe to do, if your pc isn`t having any problems.
If want to be extra safe, you can do that & then create a restore point afterwards. One restore shouldn`t take up much space.

Then once done that, see if you`ve gained a chunk of missing HDD space.

*crosses fingers*

Good luck.

That can help free up space, but the problem seems to be that the total space (not free space) is lower than it should be.

Check the disk total size with a partitioning software like Partition Wizard Home Edition, it will show any unallocated space or unknown/hidden partitions not shown in Disk Management.

Also check the disk status in Crystal Disk Info.

Shadow copy. Like this guy mentions. It backs up a bunch of crap you do on your machine. So if you have 200gb of used space, it will take 200gb for the copy.

Apologies.

It says 596GB

On a side note, when you have a new drive for example. You have to take into account the memory units from each company can vary. So when you buy a new drive at 1gb. It'll register something around 960mb or whatever. The amount of space you get to use can vary.

Perhaps not relevant, but worth noting.

That seems to correspond to a 640GB drive, are you sure it was a 750GB one? You can double check it through vendor id and hardware id if needed.
Usual case is that vendors give the capacity in Gigabytes (GB) while the OS reports the size in Gibibytes (GiB). Considering most software uses the Binary JEDEC prefixes instead of the IEC prefixes, it does lead to confusion.