Hello, Just wondering if someone can answer my question: I had a 120GB hd, with about 50 GB of free space on it. I upgraded to a 500 GB hd and had my old hd "copied" to my new hd. So, shouldn't I have AT LEAST 300-400 of the 500 GB free? After doing disc cleanup, and cleaning out old restore points and temp files, I'm still only showing 181 GB free. I did install a few games, but I've accounted for that. So where's all my NEW free space??

What does it say that the Physical Space is? Sounds like you did not partition it right.

Could be from hidden files (depending on what you copied and what was originally on the new drive). Also, 500GB is not really 500,000,000,000 bytes. A 500GB drive will generally only be able to store around 488GB of data due to the "binary vs. decimal" representation of 1000: http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_... But even so, if formatting correctly and having only 60-70GB of data on the original drive, then yes, you should have more than 181GB left...

"I upgraded to a 500 GB hd and had my old hd "copied" to my new hd" Explain how you prepared the new HDD. Did you partition & format it in advance? Which software program did you use for the cloning? "A 500GB drive will generally only be able to store around 488GB of data due to the "binary vs. decimal" representation of 1000" Actually it would be closer to 466GB. I believe you're using 1000 / 1024 x 500 to convert? It should be: 1000x1000x1000 / 1024x1024x1024 x 500 I use 0.931 as the approx conversion factor.

Tell us what you see in Disk Management as to size of the disk and used space.

Thanks for all the replies! What happened was this: my 1st hd, the 120 GB one, started to go bad - it was making a clicking sound when I turned on my computer. Luckily, it didn't crash. So, I bought another one at Comp USA and they "cloned" my old hd to my new one - and I haven't had any problems at all. It works perfectly! Except that I just put two and two together and realized that I should have MUCH more space. When I click on Computer, C drive, it shows 180 GB free of 430 GB. Recovery, or D drive shows 30.5 GB free of 35.4 GB. I'm running Vista, sp2 with all current updates. I show all hidden files. The Programs installed is only 83.5 GB. I would go back to Comp USA but my warranty (of course) is up and I really don't have any "problems" per se. Could it be a partition thing? I didn't do anything to it when I brought it home. I installed it, turned my pc on, and made sure that my pc saw the larger drive, and it did. That was it. But now, I realize that I should have lots more space available. Can anyone help? Thanks....

Download this tool.... http://www.foldersizes.com/ It is not free but you can do a 15day trial and remove it. With this you can confirm that there are not hidden system files that are eating up your space.