500GB Drive Only Shows 258GB

Since Win7 beta we've helped with several hundred complicated partitioning operations here using free Partition Wizard bootable CD.

Disk Management gives incorrect partitioning information with some regularity, but not often enough to consider it a bug.

Sometimes PW from Windows will show the exact same misinformation, however PW bootable CD has never been wrong so far which is another reason why we recommend it alone.

You can read more about PW CD capabilities and operations we frequently help with here in BareFootKid's excellent tutorial: Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD

mjf said:

gregrocker said:

Disk Management gives incorrect partitioning information with some regularity, but not often enough to consider it a bug.

Sometimes PW from Windows will show the exact same misinformation, however PW bootable CD has never been wrong so far which is another reason why we recommend it alone.

Greg,
With all due respect to the enormous expert advice you give. I consider it a serious Disk Management bug.
At a command line level, diskpart didn't pick up the problem.

Is this deficiency in the Disk Management software something we could notify Microsoft of? Possibly get them to patch/update it?

I have not been following this thread very keenly. After reading the first few posts, I did feel that there was something quirky here and the first thought that ran in my mind honestly was "Why not check the partitions with a third party bootable hard disk manager utility" and of course partition Wizard would have been my first choice. Anyway I decided to stay away, let the best brains here crack it and then check whether my brainwave really worked and it did. :)

The moral of the story is when one has problems with the HDD which Windows is unable to check, diagnose and facilitate a resolution, fall back and try other third party bootable HD management utilities and check.

In spite of Windows 7 being touted as the best OS to come out of the MS stable, it still has some quirkiness and limitations. It definitely cannot be one size-fits-all in respect of the utilities it employs.

[Even now I haven't run through all the posts in this thread and hence E & O. E.(errors and omissions excepted)]