Drive appears as wrong size in My Computer

thewiley1

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Feb 22, 2012
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I have a Windows 2008 Server R2 with (4) 500G drives configured as a single 1TBdevice under RAID-0.
I've split it into two partitions and formatted them both NTFS, an 80G C-drive and and 850GB D-drive.
Everything looks right on the Disk Management screen, and properties show a 850G drive with 8G in use and 842G free.

But, when I look in "Computer", the D-drive shows as only a 1.00GB volume with 8.00KB used and 0.99GB free. Huh???

Scandisk reports no problems -- it happily scans and reports all the correct details.
All shared folders are reporting the correct size and free space on the remote systems.
It is only the "Computer" display on the local console that is wrong.

What else can I try?
 
Solution


I've had this on a server for years, and just put it down to a weird quirk. The main IT support guy said it was a bug, bug it didn't seem to harm anything that was happening on the server, so I never investigated too much. I have just checked, and sure enough the Quota was set to 1GB on a 300GB partition, so it always appeared as a 1GB drive!!!

I can now see exactly how much drive space there is without...

thewiley1

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Feb 22, 2012
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Even though nobody was kind enough to reply to my desperate cry for help, I want to report how I solved this issue.

Somehow the Disk Quota feature was enabled for that drive, limiting it to 1GB in My Computer.
Odd, because I'm the only person that has ever touched that machine since it was installed, and I didn't do it.

 
Sorry that nobody replied before you solved it by yourself and this is the first time I have seen your post. I do have a question though , you say that you have 4- 500gb hdd's in raid and it totals 1tb shouldn't you have 2tb? On top of that 80 and 850 equal 930 so your also missing 70gb?
Windows does some strange things sometimes even though you haven't touched any settings , it's almost like it does it on its own.
 

thewiley1

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Feb 22, 2012
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Ooops. You are correct -- I mistyped that. The drives are actually 250G each but I'm using the Windows definitions of a GB so each one only yields 232G. The total size of the 4 combined drives is 931G which equals 80+851. I would have set it up with RAID-5 to yield 1.5TB if the option were available but the cheap RAID card in the Dell system will only support RAID-0 or RAID-1. So, I decided that having BackupForWorkgroups doing an incremental backup every night to a 3T external drive is enough data protection for me.

 

thewiley1

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Feb 22, 2012
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Doh! I did it again. RAID-5 would actually yield 750GB measured by drive manuafacturers or 698GB measured by Windows. Technically, Windows is correct and the drive makers are a bunch of liars.
 

Danny_Brewer

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Apr 28, 2016
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I've had this on a server for years, and just put it down to a weird quirk. The main IT support guy said it was a bug, bug it didn't seem to harm anything that was happening on the server, so I never investigated too much. I have just checked, and sure enough the Quota was set to 1GB on a 300GB partition, so it always appeared as a 1GB drive!!!

I can now see exactly how much drive space there is without going into Disk Management!
 
Solution