Clean install is over 120gb

Hi everyone, I've recently bought a new laptop. It's an Acer Swift X 14 and it came with Windows 11 Home.
I much prefer a clean install of Windows, so I went about making some space on the hard drive, created a partition, and did a clean install of Windows 11 Pro.
For some reason it's taking up about 125gb of hard drive space.
I've downloaded the iso again, created the installer again, which is about 10gb with the added drivers I need, and done about three clean installs now. How, and why, is the finished installation so big?
Mike.

It depends on how you perform the clean installation, did you delete all partitions and clean installed Windows 11 on unallocated space?

FreeBooter said:

It depends on how you perform the clean installation, did you delete all partitions and clean installed Windows 11 on unallocated space?

Click to expand...

I started by shrinking my Windows partition and creating a new partition which I formatted. I then booted off the installer and installed onto that new partition. Each time I've re-installed, I've formatted the partition before I've installed it.
Mike.

Just try to install Windows 11 on unallocated space, Windows 11 will format and partition the unallocated space for its partitions.

Also delete temporary files on your currently installed Windows 11 use Storage Sense to see deleting temporary files will reduce size of Windows 11 you have installed on hard drive.

FreeBooter said:

Just try to install Windows 11 on unallocated space, Windows 11 will format and partition the unallocated space for its partitions.

Also delete temporary files on your currently installed Windows 11 use Storage Sense to see deleting temporary files will reduce size of Windows 11 you have installed on hard drive.

Click to expand...

OK, I'll try leaving unallocated space. Why would deleting temp files on my Windows Home install help?
Mike.

crabhunter said:

OK, I'll try leaving unallocated space. Why would deleting temp files on my Windows Home install help?
Mike.

Click to expand...

The Windows 11 installation files will take huge space, so deleting the temporary files will help gain disk space.

As a reference: for me, a clean install (blanked 500gb NVME drive, fresh and unmodified ISO from Microsoft) even with all my commonly used apps and MS Office 365 installed (no games or anything that doesn't need to be installed) takes up 55.5gb.

Instead of reinstalling, I think you should install WinDirStat, it will tell you exactly what that extremely unusual waste of space is all about.

Well, I've made some progress. I made another usb installer but this time with only two additional drivers, one for IO to get the track pad working and a driver for the hard drive. This install is only taking up 39gb at present, but I have to do it again this time adding the wi-fi drivers as I cannot complete setup. I'm hoping the finished size will not increase after completing setup. I will then have to try and find out which driver was causing the issue.

crabhunter said:

I started by shrinking my Windows partition and creating a new partition which I formatted. I then booted off the installer and installed onto that new partition. Each time I've re-installed, I've formatted the partition before I've installed it.

Click to expand...

There's probably nothing wrong with your drivers or your bootable media, but how you did the clean install
You should have imaged your OEM installation and done clean install following the tutorial. Don't deviate from it. Windows needs to create it's own partitions during install.
It sounds to me like you now have 2 installation of windows on the drive and your bootloader is probably now on the wrong partition. Can't say for sure without a screenshot of disk management. If that be so, when you delete the OEM partitions your new install will not boot.
Clean Install Windows 11 Tutorial

Glad to see you are making progress. In the background, I installed Windows 11 Pro 23H2 on a VM and I allocated a 60GB hard drive to it and clean installed.

My install used just around 20GB of space, 21,266,649,088 bytes to be exact.


I then went out and downloaded Treesizefree, got the zip version of the application and unzipped it. This is a report showing my space usage.



Edit: Went back to my VM, ran Windows updates and got everything available, rebooted a few times and this is where I am sitting now.

You didn't mention how you're adding the driver files, but don't import from the extracted NVIDIA folder. Load a specific driver instance (*.inf) which matches your graphics model.

Of course, if you never installed the system before -- you can't see what the driver .inf filename is from Device Manager. So you need to have a live system to know, before re-imaging it.

By default, when DISM (or a DISM-based tool) imports drivers from a folder, it scans all *.inf files underneath and adds them to the image's DriverStore. The problem is NVIDIA's core drivers aren't that huge, but the included graphics libraries are massive. And when DISM detects the multiple INF files, it assumes they're all each separate devices and duplicates the shared graphics libraries. Now your DriverStore is bloated to 40 GB of duplicated driver files.

The solution is to have DISM add just the single INF file, instead of scanning the parent folder. DriverStore grows by an expected 1-1.5 GB.

also, depending upon the amount of RAM you have and your configuration, you may have the following 3 files eating up space on the root of your C drive.

in my case, on my VM that I allocated 8,192MB of RAM, i see the following.

hiberfil.sys (I don't have one)
pagefile.sys (mine is 1.93GB)
swapfile.sys (mine is 256MB)

Don't forget Reserved Storage "borrows" 6-8 GB.