Bare 750gb hard drive 90% full immediately after installing Win7?

[nbixr]

I just tried installing windows 7 on a 750 gig hard drive that I just got. During setup it showed as 698gb of empty unallocated space, as it should. I made just the 1 primary partition, and let the windows install go on just like normal. It finished, and looked ok.

But then, I immediately open "my computer" and see the C drive showing ~650gig used out of 698. That ain't right! I couldn't exactly find what was taking up the space. The drive had no old files or OS on it that I could find (Note, I got it used, and can't guarantee if/how it was wiped, if at all). I didn't do a full format (probably should have I guess).

The system is at my office, so I can't poke around till tomorrow, but please let me know any suggestions. Thanks.
What exactly is going on here? I've never run into this one before, and I've installed and re-installed plenty of win7 systems. Would bad drive sectors cause this? I'm using the same win7 bootable usb I've used before with no issues. I wonder if I have to return the drive....

 

[popatim]

Did you delete all existing partitions when you installed 7 ?

 

[nbixr]

Well, there were none to be seen. When I put in the drive, it showed up as nothingness, just empty unallocated space. Windows install offered to make a partition out of the full space, which I did.

Often I'll boot my linux live usb to check out a new drive before I do anything with it, just to see, but the one time I don't bother to, right?

 

[nbixr]

I will at least run CHKDSK tomorrow and see what I get. But any ideas why this might happen?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there nbixr,

You can test the drive with some HDD testing tool and see whether the results will show that there is something wrong with the drive.
Apart from that, you can see whether your system has created some restore points. Just adjust your System Restore options(reduce the space allocated for that) and delete previous restore points.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[nbixr]

Well, this showed up immediately, as soon as I looked, at about 10 seconds after booting into the windows installation for the first time ever. I 'm not sure how there could actually be 600gigs of anything on the drive.