My laptop doesn't have the storage it says it has

[Tefco]

A few weeks ago, i bought a laptop for online school and to play some games. I chose GW0000 since it was good enough for what i needed. At the website we ordered it from, it said the laptop had 256gb of storage, but when it arrived and after installing the OS, it said i only have 100gb on C drive. It said in the storage files that the OS took up 150gb, but after a few days it cleared up and it matched my current storage. When i open Hp support assistant it says that my laptop has 238 GB of storage. My question is, do i have less storage than i am supposed to, or maybe 256gb is upgradable from the base 100? Sorry if it is a stupid question, i don't know much about laptops honestly. Thank you in advance!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

You have to calculate the net usable space with a formula.

A 256 GB hard drive will never provide the full 256 GB of storage.

See this chart...

How can I calculate hard drive space? (for Windows, MacOS)? - Details of an answer | Buffalo Inc. (b...

[Tefco]

I understand that much, on the HP assistant it says it has 238gb, the problem is that i only have 100gb of storage usable on the C drive, and there really are no drives available. Even when i do a storage check it only checks those on the C drive. I'm not sure if the other part is supposed to be upgradable or i was supposed to have it with my laptop but i just dont, or is it hidden or somethinf like that. As i mentioned im not well informed about laptops or pcs in general. Thank you for your reply tho! If maybe you have an answer or need more detail please feel free to say it!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Windows would have taken up some storage space, but it shouldn't have used 100 GB.

Have you installed anything other than the basic Windows operating system?

Is there a Windows.old folder showing up on the C:\ drive from a previous installation?

[Tefco]

No, i havent found a windows.old on my c drive. This is how my This pc and hp assistant look like. The assistant clearly says 238 gb, so i really do not know why do i only have 100 gb. I did install some apps on it, so im not concerned about why i only have 37 out of this 100, but where did the ohther 138gb go?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

What does your Disk Management Utility indicate? 

It almost sounds to me like you have part of the drive not initialized.

Here is a screenshot of mine...I have a 1 TB hard drive and all kinds of programs and files on it, and as you can see, I have over 742 GB of free space left.

[Tefco]

I haven't seen that, I'm having trouble finding disk management utility, could you tell me how to find it?

[Tefco]

I managed to find it, is this it? What can i do with it?

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

You didn't install the operating system correctly, and somehow you have an entire partition (partition 5) that is not available to you.

Right click on partition 5 (Raw), select Format, and format it with the NTFS file system and you will reclaim 138.36 GB  of your missing space.

[Tefco]

Thank you so much for your help! I did as you said and i formatted it to NTFS. One last question, i cant seem to find the reclaimed storage, do you maybe know how could i do that? Sorry for bothering you so much!