hard drive full, hardly any files showing

[itslate]

I'm trying to recover files for my brother who accidently partitioned his hard drive while reinstalling windows, wiping out his entire drive.

I'm trying to recover his files to one of my free hard drives, using Handy Recovery. When I check properties of the drive now it says... 197 gigs used of 183 gig hard drive. However I only see 484 megs of files.

I have one folder in this drive named recovery. It was an empty drive. I have it checked to show hidden files and protected OS files too. I see nothing more than 484 megs used. No swap file or anything there.

I did a scandisk, had to reboot to do it. Still nothing. It's showing in disk management as 183 gigs and healthy. NTFS formatted. I just recently formatted the drive using Acronis True Image. There doesn't appear to be any problems with the drive. I'm stumped. I never had this happen before.

eta: recyler is empty too.