before anything , i think it’s important to let you know that i used to share GBs between my HDDs (shrinking and extending the partitions of each of them, but not the ssd ofc :) i have a 128 ssd for the system and 3 hdds each of them are 500 GBs .
here is the short story
1- my windows system failed . 2- i took the chance to try linux . 3- immediate regret . 4- installed windows again - 5 it ran a ( fixing partition E) before logging in . 6- 200GBs+ are just gone
the missing 200 GBs can be seen in the disk manager as part of the E drive but not in the file explorer ( the file explorer shows that the E drive is only 212 GBs while the disk manager shows that it is 500+ ) all of the files i had before are there but many of them are just 0 bytes files . and also in the settings it says that there are 400+GBs used in the E drive , even though the remaining files in that drive are just 170 gbs . and the other 2 partitions are just fine but one 0f the partitions lost the shared E drive GBs
I’d like to know more about that formatting. Here I don’t format when I want a clean install but remove all the partitions on the target drive then again, I don’t format or partition. I boot the Windows install media and point it at the blank drive. The installer uses that drive and I don’t have to deal with finding the lost space.