Missing Hard Drive Space

Hey all,
I recently realized that my Asus m50sv-a1 (with Vista 32-bit sp1) is saying that I only have 186 gb on my hard drive when it should be around 250gb. Is there a way to get the missing space back?
Thanks

 

250 GB = arround 230 GB, plus if your laptop has a built in recovery system, E.G. you can press F11 or somthing like that when the pc is loading to reinstall the computer, that uses quite alot of harddrive space..

Hope this was usefull

 

As Mr Bean said, you will only have about 230 GB to start with (manufacturer reads a GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, Windows reads one as 1,073,741,824 bytes). On top of that there may be a recovery partition, various bloatware preinstalled, and system restore points/shadow copy.

 

System Restore may also be responsible for taking up some of the space. A recovery partition can take up to 8GB of space or more. I always delete these after backing them up.

I rely on disk imaging and never use Recovery partitions.

 

Thanks for the responses, however, I don't think part of the issue is with System Restore, because I tried changing the amount of space devoted to it and end up with the memory used changing, not the maximum hard drive space (eg, if i had 20gb/186gb of free space, I would hope the 186 would change from changing the memory devoted to System Restore, but it doesn't, only the 20 changes leaving me still with a maximum of 186 gb).

Even if I take into account the 250gb = 230gb, that still leaves 40gb unaccounted for. Are those 40gb really taken up by bloatware and System Restore? Also, wouldn't memory taken up by bloatware show up under the space used, and not have an effect on the maximum hard drive space?

 

System restore (for recovering to factory drive image) is a separate partition, as opposed to windows system restore which saves files on your hard disk, usually about a GB. So it would show up in disk management, but not on your C: drive. Bloatware is on your system partition so that'd show up.

 

Ah, thanks for clearing that up for me. I went to check under disk management, and I think there is no partition, but I'm not sure. Should the partition set aside for system restore be showing up here or is it somewhere else? (I've attached how disk management looks on my computer).

 

Nope, no recovery partition it looks like... If you go to device manager what is the model # of your disk... maybe it's got a smaller drive than you paid for? Weirdness.

 

Wow, you are absolutely right. I have ST9200420 which is the 200GB model, which makes the 186 GB make sense. I'm just a complete idiot. Thanks so much for everyone's help. The stickers on the computer threw me off as did looking at the wrong place on the old order sheets.

 

Well, at least you're out of the twilight zone now

But every spec sheet I find for that model says 250GB so whatever... glad it's not something weird.