Clean Win 7 install shows conflicting hdd sizes at the same time.

Here's a new one for you...

To avoid any risk of deleting any files, I decided to install my new Windows 7 OS on a new hard drive. I unplugged my old hard drive. Unplugged both power and SATA cable.

I installed it on the new drive, and everything seemed to be going well, but I had a look at my computer's properties showing that I had 35.1 GB free of 579 GB on the drive. The drive is a 2TB drive. The 579GB is referencing the OLD hard drive size, which is STILL UNPLUGGED.

A. How would the new OS know of the old OS drive size?
B. Is there a drive size limitation? (however archaic it would seem given the size of new hard drives and current state of the 64bit Windows 7 OS)
C. Why would it report, on the same OS, at the same time, in "computer" and "computer management"... TWO DIFFERENT SIZES OF THE SAME PARTITION?
D. Why would the drive be full after ONE DAY worth of installation of Win7 and Photoshop. There are no movies, photos or other large space consumers on the drive, just the installation. It took nearly two years to fill it that full on Vista with videos, photos, etc...
E. Sorry for the cross-posting. Delete or move where necessary.

I would run a disk check and see what errors it will find...

After you fitted the new HDD did you reboot the machine, and check it reported correctly in the system BIOS, and allow the BIOS to detect it if not?

Qdos said:

After you fitted the new HDD did you reboot the machine, and check it reported correctly in the system BIOS, and allow the BIOS to detect it if not?

Oh yeah, I've made the mistake of reformatting the wrong drive before. So even though I unplugged my original C drive, I also verified the drive reported the correct brand/size in BIOS and in windows install.

It also asked me if I wanted to boot to vista or win 7. Again, the old hdd is/was unplugged and IMO the only thing that would have retained any Vista knowledge would have been the MN. I probably should have reset the BIOS at first boot before installation.

Disk check is still going, 3 errors found. "corrupt attribute records"

The hardware configuration is stored in NVRAM. If you change to a different disk, you need to clear CMOS memory or the BIOS will report the old drive to Windows. Clearing will force the BIOS to re-detect your hardware and as such, the new drive.

You should not have run dskchk on the new drive. Windows thinks it's the old drive and you WILL get errors.

Spendlove said:

I also verified the drive reported the correct brand/size in BIOS and in windows install .... I probably should have reset the BIOS at first boot before installation.

These two statements conflict somewhat.

I'm absolutely certain you cannot have taken the correct steps at BIOS level, but I guess many people wouldn't think of that as a great many more modern mainboards have a BIOS which sniffs out changes and automatically accounts for them without any user intervention.

I second the notion that using chkdsk under these circumstances cannot get you anywhere beneficial.

Good points. While it seems to conflict, I am sure I read a capacity of 2TB before doing the install. I think it somehow has both sizes in the BIOS, and I verified one, not knowing there could be two. Since I'm not far into the overall setup I think I'm going to try a reformat again, resetting everything in sight.