Missing hard drive space after restoring laptop to factory settings

Hi,

Restored laptop (Acer Aspire 5735, OS Windows Vista Home Basic 32 bit) to factory settings a few months ago and noticed that there was a lot of space being used up on C: drive even though I hadn't started installing programs and putting files back on to laptop.

Used SpaceSniffer to see where all the space was being used up and it only found the C: drive to have size of 38.1GB even though it should have 69.6GB. Also ran WinDirStat and that also said C: drive had size 38.1GB.

Any suggestions on why there seems to be 31.5GB missing?

Any help would be greatly appreciated,
thanks!
 
"it should have 69.6GB"...
Is the drive 80GB unformatted? Did you format the drive when starting the restore? This is known as a "destructive" restore. If you didn't, it is possible that the old Vista files are still on the drive, along with the new files, taking up the space
 
Thanks for gettin back to me.

I don't think I did format the drive when I did the restore. I thought it may be the old Vista files taking up the space but I don't seem to be able to find a windows.old folder on the C: drive. Is there another folder I should be looking for?
 
Where C is the hard drive and D is the CD/DVD drive? You might try doing the restore again, but this may be impossible now because you see no recovery partition
 
Sorry i meant two hard drives so C and D are hard drives

The HDD is partitioned. You would add the size of both to get your HDD size. You really should do a reformat. Backup your drivers and reinstall a fresh copy of Windows. You will be pleasantly surprised with the outcome if you have not done this recently.
 
Forgot to reply

Just a quick update for you guys. Sorry its late. I did what Buckshot420 suggested. Computer is performing really well now. That format was definitely needed. Thanks for your help
 
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