500GB Drive Only Shows 258GB

Lee1075 said:

In computer management Disk management, if you right click on your drives (C or D) an option should appear for "expanding or shrinking" your drive space. Have you tried that?

Thanks. Yes. The "Extend Volume" choice is grayed out; only "Shrink Volume" is available.

mjf said:

If you are still experimenting you could try
(1) go to command prompt
>dir /a
and see if the free space agrees with windows explorer (probably will).
Means it's an issue you will have to resolve or your directory will think the disk is full when it isn't.
(2) depending on your comfort levels you could image c:
attach the vhd under disk management. Then see what windows explorer pie chart for the mounted image.

Here's a screen shot of the command line window after running dir /a. Without running the conversion, the reported free space of 177,615,155,200 bytes sounds pretty close to the reported 165 GB free in windows explorer.

WindowsStar said:

A few questions:

#1 Was this hard drive in a Windows XP machine, then someone deleted all the directories and installed Windows 7 on it? Looks like there are old Windows XP files on the drive.
#2 Why do you have the {B5BE68F8.... on the root?

#1 - No. I reformated when I installed Win7 64 bit on it last November.
#2 - I have no idea. I don't know where the file came from or what it's for. Why? Is it important that it be somewhere else?

gregrocker said:

There are times when Disk Mgmt is wrong, but normally Explorer won't agree.

However when Disk Mgmt is wrong on partitioning details or sizes, I use free Partition Wizard bootable CD (not the Windows version) to get the actual size or staus.

Free Download Magic Partition Manager Software - Partition Wizard Online

The size given for C is too close to what it should be for D to not think that they are being confused. However, to make sure i would also run chkdsk /r and the HD maker's diag/repair CD scan (Data Lifeguard) since the only way a truly 500gb HD would report such disparately less space is if it had multiple bad sectors quarantined by formatting.

Disk Check
Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.

You can run reasonably good versions of both of these tests from Partition Wizard CD: Check File System and Surface Scan. If they report errors I would cross-check with Disk Check and Maker's Diag scan.

You're the man! Using the bootable version of Partition Wizard demonstrated that the drive was acting as if the boot partition used only a part of the drive. Resizing to the entire usable space restored the capacity.

Running chkdsk afterwards showed only one un-indexed file, which it repaired.

Thanks to everyone, and especially you, gregrocker, for all the suggestions, whether I'd already tried them or not. The attitudes here are superb!

Glad to see you got it sorted.
A bit sad that it took Partition Wizard (which many of us use) to point out the problem.
C: is one partition and the boot partition. I would have expected Disk management to show something (eg. unallocated space).

mjf said:

Glad to see you got it sorted.
A bit sad that it took Partition Wizard (which many of us use) to point out the problem.
C: is one partition and the boot partition. I would have expected Disk management to show something (eg. unallocated space).

I did too. I wonder if something went screwy in the formatting of the drive at installation of Windows 7. Also, I wonder why Partition Wizard noticed the unallocated space and Windows Explorer and Disk Management didn't.

Anyhow, good to see the problem fixed, and the rest of that space is opened up for you.

Thanks for all the support, guys. I too was baffled by the disagreement between the two reports (which is why I asked for help), but gratefull that there was a simple fix.

I stopped using partition managers when hard drives became so cheap, so it was only in my background thinking. I was about to check up on whether my trusty and well used copy of Partition Magic would work when gregrocker suggested Partition Wizard. I think at least someone else suggested it too, so I don't want to minimise that help.

I rated everyone up who offered suggestions. This forum is fabulous, and I'll recommend to anyone who I can't help with computer issues.