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My C drive has a capacity of 98 gb , after installing windows 8 release preview just now, when i look at the properties of C drive, it says 27 GB used and remaining empty, but when i go into C drive and select all folders and right click on properties, it shows a capacity of only 17gb, so my question is why this difference?

Where is the remaining 10gb?

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They are in hidden folders, such as the restore points. –  David Schwartz Jul 31 '12 at 9:42
I changed the folder options to view all hidden files and folders, still no change –  kira Jul 31 '12 at 10:09
As mentioned by Anon the "System Volume Information" folder is a folder that can easily be 10GB in size and additionally is generally protected by security permissions so that a "normal" user cannot find out the size of it. This means it will not count towards your capacity total (via file/folder properties) but will count towards the disk used quantity. Other similarly protects folders can and will exist that won't show up on your totals. –  Mokubai Jul 31 '12 at 11:46
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Two huge files that you don't normally see are for hibernation and paging (some might call it a swap file). I'd be willing to bet that at least half of that missing 10Gb is in those 2 files alone - cause they're hidden. There's still a "System Volume Information" folder and possibly a "Recovery" folder that are also hidden with all kinds of files in them too. Then there are many more sub folders with hidden files and even hidden sub folders all over the place too numerous to list. Therefore, I really wouldn't worry too much. Hidden files and folders are normal and shouldn't show up as available hard drive space.

You might even note that Windows "normally" partitions your hard drive into at least 2 different partitions too! One partition is used for booting, is typically only 100Meg and is hidden by not giving it a drive letter. The other partition is usually your C: drive where any further booting takes place and where your Windows installation will be located.

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