Solved Windows reporting incorrect total disk size

[KrisPWales]

I have a 3TB Seagate external hard drive which was fine, but now reports the wrong disk size. Disk management correctly reports the total size as around 3TB. However the properties in window explorer says I only have 5GB free of 746GB. I've tried CHKDSK etc but can't explain it. Any help would be much appreciated!

 

[bobafetthotmail]

Can you post a screenshot of your disk management?

 

[KrisPWales]

Here is the disk management screenshot. The E: drive is correctly reporting the size. I can't post the corresponding explorer shot showing a 746GB capacity as I'm running a full chkdsk (it's taken two days so far - is this normal?).

 

[bobafetthotmail]

Ok, you did a good thing. Full checkdisk to check if the drive is defective. Unfortunately it takes a lot of time on drives of this size, especially if the external drive is using USB 2.0. As long as the bar keeps moving or you see numbers changing, then it's ok. The main reason why I still prefer to keep a drive of about 320 GB as system drive. (and why I run checkdisk by command line, more verbose, and I can see what the darn thing is actually doing)

Whenever it ends, assuming the drive passed the test and the issue is still there, try deleting the partition from disk management and creating a new one (as big as the whole drive, just like the old one) and formatting it as NTFS. Move any data you want to keep on another drive, because this does delete anything that is still on it.

Also make sure that the disk is using GPT and not MBR, following this tutorial. GPT allows the use of partitions bigger than 2 TB, MBR does not.

 

[KrisPWales]

Almost 5 days and still not halfway according to the progress bar. It is still moving though, very slowly.

 

[KrisPWales]

Thanks for that - changing the disk to GPT fixed the issue.