Just erased my HD to do a clean install of Lion, now I'm missing 25 GB of SSD space?!

[BenLeong]

Yikes. So after having some system-wide problems, I attempted to start from scratch by erasing my HD and reinstalling Lion on my 2011 MBP 15" with 128 GB SSD. Everything seemed to install fine(had to do Internet Recovery, as my bootable thumb drive didn't work for some reason...), but when I click on Finder to look at my hard drive space, it says I only have 102.81 GB of free space! Any ideas as to what happened to the other 25 GB of space?

Here's are the steps I've taken:

-Rebooted by holding down Command + R
-Used Disk Utility to clear the hard drive
-Downloaded and installed Lion
-Noticed that Garage Band, iMovie and iPhoto weren't included in the Lion install(is this normal?), so I downloaded them off the Mac App Store
-Reinstalled Pages and Numbers via the Mac App Store
-Installed the PhoneDisk app
-Checked for any Software Updates(none showed)

And that's it.

What's taking up all of my precious space? I don't remember what amount of HD space I started out with when my new MBP shipped to me... but I'd find it hard to believe that I started with 20% less than what I ordered.

Any clues/tips would be great!

 

[GGJstudios]

If you're wondering what "Other" category in the Lion storage tab is about, this may help explain:

What is this "Other" in the storage tab? What is eating my space​

For space issues not explained by the above, there are a few things you can try, some of which may or may not apply:

• Begin by restarting your computer as a first step. This sometimes resolves issues.
• For Time Machine users on notebooks running Lion, space may being consumed by Time Machine local snapshots, which can be disabled.
  OS X Lion: About Time Machine's "local snapshots" on portable Macs
• Search with Finder to see if the space is being consumed by a very large file or several large files. Adjust the 50GB in the illustration to whatever size you deem appropriate.
  
  
• Use OmniDiskSweeper, JDisk Report, Disk Inventory X or GrandPerspective to see how space is being used on your drive. Some of these apps may show more detail than others, so try several.

 

[BenLeong]

I'll give those ideas a try. One thing to point out though: I haven't set up Time Machine yet. Would Time Machine backups start even though I haven't set it up yet?

 

[GGJstudios]

I'll give those ideas a try. One thing to point out though: I haven't set up Time Machine yet. Would Time Machine backups start even though I haven't set it up yet?

No, only if you set up TM.