Why does my 60 Gig HD show 12.5 Gig capacity?

October 26, 2008 6:42 PM

Why does my Lenovo ThinkPad T60 running Windows XP 60 Gig HD show 12.5 Gig capacity? Screenshot of the weirdness: http://screencast.com/t/5wUUE5BORI
posted by zalary to computers & internet (8 comments total)

If I'm not mistaken, the partition size is reported at the top, but the physical disk size is reported down below. I know this doesn't explain it, but it is seeing the disk as 60 GB, and a partition of 12.5 GB... that's not necessarily broken. Is this a newly formatted drive?
posted by tdischino at 7:51 PM on October 26, 2008

Um... you're mistaken. That is indeed weird. The graphical display at the bottom is showing that C: has one partition, the full size of the drive (if it were smaller, there would be some free space shown to the right of the box representing the partition). However, the NTFS filesystem on that partition is reporting its size as 12.5GB. I suspect that the filesystem is either corrupt, or has been written to that partition using disk imaging software rather than having been originally formatted in the usual way, or has been resized at some point using a tool like ntfsresize.

If that were my own laptop, I would be (a) running a full backup to an external drive, using the inbuilt Windows Backup and then (b) right-clicking C: drive in an Explorer window, selecting Properties, Tools and check C: for errors. If there are none, it should be safe to use ntfsresize to resize the filesystem to the full size of the partition again. But do back everything up first.
posted by flabdablet at 8:22 PM on October 26, 2008

Are you running any software that might interpose on the file system calls?

For example, Rational Clearcase used to do all sorts of crazy things to my system's reported disk size.
posted by IvyMike at 8:55 PM on October 26, 2008

I'd suggest making a good backup and defragmenting. Then, I'd get a copy of Partition Magic or a Linux live distribution with GTParted and try adjusting the partition to full size in the program. If that doesn't work, I'd then try reformating the drive and reinstalling Windows (Hence the backup, which is also there in case something gets screwed up for the non-destructive repartioning).

If that still doesn't work, then it's pretty much most definitely a faulty drive or drive controller. Lenovo should fix that if it's still under warranty, or you could just buy a replacement drive and install it yourself.
posted by mccarty.tim at 9:23 PM on October 26, 2008

If you don't find an answer pronto, back-up your data and re-format.

This could happen (wild guess here) if the partition is NTFS and 60 gigs in size, but for some reason the NTFS filesystem formatted on it was 15 gigs.

Maybe.. it had more than one partition, and someone deleted the rest, resized the existing one, but didn't enlarge the filesystem?

Something weird would have to happen to do this - did it come from the factory this way?
If so - it could be a bug in the deployment process that lenovo used to wedge XP on there?
posted by TravellingDen at 10:22 PM on October 26, 2008

Is there some sort of virtual RAID setup going on?
posted by stopgap at 10:36 PM on October 26, 2008

Backup and reformat. It's the only way to be sure.
posted by rokusan at 5:05 AM on October 27, 2008

No it isn't.

If the NTFS file system check reports no errors, the file system is safe and functional.

If ntfsresize is happy to resize it, it's safe and functional and the right size again.

The point of backing it up is to guard against the possibility that it might be somewhat broken and that the NTFS file system check might break it even worse instead of fixing it. If that happens, then reformat and restore from your backup. Otherwise, ntfsresize will do the necessary work much more quickly.
posted by flabdablet at 5:28 AM on October 27, 2008