Disk management shows different drive capacity from windows explorer

[dclong]

I have a 2TB Seagate hard drive. Disk Management correctly shows a capacity of 1863.01 GB available space.

Windows Explorer, on the other hand hand, shows a total capacity of 181 GB.

Any advice would be tremendously appreciated!

Thanks,

Daniel

 

[evongugg]

Check if any hidden files are on the disk.
Could be Vista ShadowStorage restore points.

 

[evongugg]

Mysterious Vista Volume Shadow Copy Service

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/windows-vista-solutions,review-1179-2.html

 

[sminlal]

Mysterious Vista Volume Shadow Copy Service

That's]http://www.tomsguide.com/us/windows-vista-solutions,review-1179-2.html

That's a great article, thanks for the link!

 

[dclong]

My appologies - I should have been more specific. This is a completely clean disk ... never before used.

 

[sminlal]

What OS and SP level are you running? IIRC earlier SP levels of XP don't handle 2TB disks...

 

[evongugg]

137 Gb was the size limit of earlier Windows XP installations.
You may need a bios update for a disk of that size.

 

[Paperdoc]

Actually, I suspect Service Packs on XP is not the issue. As evongugg says, the 28-bit LBA limit was 137 GB by HDD maker's numbers, and M$ calls that 128 GB. 48-bit LBA Support solved that limit problem. But OP says his Explorer indicates 181 GB. That ain't 128, which is the usual indicator. Moreover, it is larger than 128 GB, so I don't see how Explorer under original XP could come up with that number.

I think we need clearer info on what Disk Manager is showing. Of the two right-hand panes there, does this HDD show up both in the upper and lower panes? In the lower right-hand pane, does the unit show as one block with a size of 1863 GB? Does it have a letter assigned as its name? Or, is that block shown as an 1863 GB block that contains in it a smaller named block of size 181 GB, plus a whole big bunch of Unallocated Space? Your Explorer info suggests that the big drive has only one Partition established on it with a size of 181 GB, and more unused space.

 

[dclong]

It's Vista Home Premium 32-bit with all the latest and greatest updates, etc. installed. Disk Manager shows 931.51 GB NTFS - no free or unallocated space left in both the upper and lower panes. It is marked "Healthy" and partitioned as a Primary Partition.

Windows Explorer shows 999 MB and formatting hangs at 9%.

Seagate SeaTools for DOS shows the drive to be perfectly healthy and even a complete format to zero does not change anything. Seagate proclaims it to be a Windows issue.

 

[Paperdoc]

When you run Seatools for DOS, what does it show you as the maximum Logical Block Address?

Seagate built into many of their HDD's a system to limit the disk's usable size for compatibility with older hardware. You can use Seatools for DOS to re-specify the maximum LBA address it will use, and that will be stored in the HDD's firmware. From then on the whole world believes it is this new smaller size. For example, I installed a 160 GB HDD from Seagate in an older system that cannot be upgraded to the newer "48-bit LBA Support" system, so it had to be limited to the 137 GB max size. I used Seatools to specify that its maximum Logical Block number is 268,435,456 blocks. At 512 bytes per sector, that comes to 137,438,953,472 bytes and no hardware or software can force that disk to go beyond that.

As part of this system, in the same area of Seatools, Seagate built in an undo tool: you can tell it to restore the hard drive to its original true full capacity, whatever that is. For a 2 TB drive it is probably around 4,294,967,296 Logical Blocks, which could give you 2,199,023,255,552 bytes max.

So, use Seatools' utility for this and look closely at what it says it has for the maximum number of Logical Blocks. It should be around 4 billion. If it's set to more like 2 billion, that would explain less than 1 TB. Assuming the disk is empty and you are not trying to use any of its data, use the Seatools utility to restore its full capacity.

If that is not the issue, it's back to looking at what Windows is doing.

 

[dclong]

Hey everyone, thanks a million for all your suggestions!

Paperdoc I checked with SeaTools and it shows that the drive is 48-bit addressed and 3,907,029,167 LBAs.

I ran two clean installs of Vista Home Premium 32-bit, installed all the latest and greatest drivers, SP-1 and SP-2, updates, etc.

I have two identical of these drives and divvied each of them up into two identical partitions of 931.51 GB each. On both Disk 0 and Disk 1 the first partition formats just the way God intended. The second partition on both drives hangs after formatting 9%.

Am setting aside 10 hours now to run SeaTools for DOS and run their long test.

AARRRRGGGHHH!

Daniel

 

[Paperdoc]

Good, Seatools confirms the disk is set up right at the hardware level. Still, it's frustrating that they don't work as expected. Hate to say it, but two disks treated identically and exhibiting identical problems suggest you did something wrong both times - I have no idea what! It's just unusual for two drives to show identical problems if they both are manufacturer's issues. Not impossible, of course! But you are doing the right thing. If you contact Seagate for help or RMA services, the first thing they will want is the results of Seatools runs, so save them.

 

[dclong]

Thanks, PaperDoc. I have resigned myself - just for now (<<eg>>) - that it's a driver issue and that it will hopefully will fade away with Windows 7. Unless, of course, it is a Dell XPS-600 issue (wouldn't surprise me either).

Thanks everyone for all your input!

 

[CompuExpressMX]

Actually there is no problem with your hard drive, the reason Windows shows less capacity on your drive relies on the way formatted (NTFS, FAT, etc) drives work.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive

A general rule of thumb to quickly convert the manufacturer's hard disk capacity to the standard Microsoft Windows formatted capacity is 0.93*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs less than a terabyte and 0.91*capacity of HDD from manufacturer for HDDs equal to or greater than 1 terabyte.

Which totally satisfies your situation (2TB * 0.91 = 1.82TB)

 

[sminlal]

Actually there is no problem with your hard drive, the reason Windows shows less capacity on your drive relies on the way formatted (NTFS, FAT, etc) drives work.

He's not complaining about the 1.8TB size, he's complaining about the 181GB (that's GIGA, not TERA).

 

[AJ_EQ]

Hey Guys,

Sorry to drag up an old thread, but I'm having exactly the same problem. Brand new Sammy f4 2tb, just formatted. Explorer shows 1.81tb free space and disk management shows 1863.01gb.

Did anyone solve this problem?

Im running Xp Media Centre SP 3.

Thanks

 

[caiosan]

Sorry to write in an old thread. But I've just solved similar problem. I'd cloned my old disk to a new one (seagate hybrid) and the windows 7 was showing the size of the older disk.

So, I typed 'diskpart' then 'select NUMBERDISK' then 'select NUMBERPARTITION' and finally 'extend filesystem'.

I'd expect help with somebody.

 

[jman_26]

Thanks, but there is NO SUCH COMMAND as "select NUMBERDISK" - can you please be more specific.

I think you mean "select disk 1" or something like that.

 

[jman_26]

Assuming disk 0, partition 3 is the one with the issue:

The correct set of commands is:
select DISK 0
select partition 3
extend filesystem

BUT, then are we supposed to REBOOT? Because this did not change ANYTHING in my situation - in Disk Manager, it still shows "C:" has 100% FREE, which is totally bogus. Yes, my issue also was from a sector-to-sector disk clone,

 

[jman_26]

update: i rebooted after doing the DISKPART commands, but there is no difference. looks like diskpart does NOTHING. ?

 

[caiosan]

I saw that my posting was incomplete.

I'll try to detail it.

My problem was that I had a 120 GB HD with windows 7.
Then I cloned it (with clonezilla) to a new HD into a partition with 200 GB. But After reboot, the windows 7 showed 120 GB.

The typed below commands

diskpart
select disk NUMDISK
select partition NUMPART
extend filesystem

and they worked for me.

I suggest that you careful try again. See the help commands typing help in every step. I don't remember if I had to reboot the system but I think that I didn't.

If it does not work. I would like to know.

Good luck,

Caio.

 

[jman_26]

That is a MUCH different problem from what I have.

The ONLY problem i have is - inside "Disk Management," it shows 100% *FREE* on c: drive! AND it shows 285GB USES [AND] 285GB free.
And diskpart had absolutely NO effect (for this particular problem).

So then I went ahead in Disk Management, and did "Extend Partition" on my C: drive, and Win 7 did extend it to the full 500GB just fine

BUT, then I go into disk management and it still is NOT updated; still (now) shows 500 GB used; 500 gb FREE; 100% free on my C: drive.
Thanks.

 

[jman_26]

Since you cloned your drive as well, I urge you also to go into Disk Management and see if it has such an incorrect size reported for your c: drive (100% free).

 

[caiosan]

How you can see in the figure below I had your issue too. But these partition are EXT4 and they cannot be handle by diskpart. Namely, the windows isn't able to recognize them.

Could be something in the NTFS partition table that doesn't allow the Disk Management reads the correct values. But this is my hypothesis.

I think that I cannot help you.

Good luck,

Caio.

 

[Guest]

I had kind of similar problem. I tried to shrink volume of my primary partition (300GB) to 200 GB and created another partition of 100 GB. Both were formatted as NTFS partitions. After few days, I stopped seeing the 100 GB partition. Disk management was showing 300 GB capacity (lower half of the panel) but Windows explorer and upper half of disk management was showing only 200 GB capacity. I tried everything but could not find my lost partition (fortunately it was empty).

I tried solution by caiosan to extend volume using diskpart and it solved the problem partially. I am seeing full capacity of disk although I seem to have lost the partition I created.

So thank you caiosan.

PS - I am using Win 7 SP 1