Hi All, This one is confusing me. I'm not entirely sure how long the issue has been present but I'm struggling to figure out why this is happening. Background Info: I have a Win 2008 R2 Server running as a NAS. I have 5 internal hard drives (one for the OS only) and 3 external drives. Some drives are encrypted with truecrypt and mounted. I have no issues with these drives. Issue: I have one Seagate Barracuda (possibly a 7200.11) 1.5tb (1.36tb actual) hard drive. This drive is used both as a temporary download storage drive and for storing and reencoding TV recorded via a TV tuner in a media center pc. When I log onto the server and open this drive, if I select all of the folders on the drive and let windows calculate the total file size it tells me it is 1.06tb. This should give me a free capacity of around 300gb. However when I view the drive through Disk Management, My Computer or view the properties of the drive windows tells me that the "Used Space" is 1.21tb with a free space of 151gb. This is where it has me stumped, by my maths almost 150gb is being used up by something seemingly hidden to the Admin account on the server. I've double checked and I have show hidden files and folders set in the folder options. I also have show protected files set. So I should be seeing all files on the drive. I've run WinDirStat and the totals there add up to 1.06tb as well. I've run "vssadmin list shadowstorage" from elevated CMD and received "Error: The shadow copy provider had an unexpected error while trying to process the specified command" I'm pretty sure from some research that this is because I have truecrypt mounted partitions. The drive in question is however not encrypted. I've checked over all the other drives in the server to see if this issue is present anywhere else and it isn't, so this would appear to be drive specific. I've run Iobit's disk cleaner from the iobit toolbox suite and it only found a bunch of thumbs.db files <184kb in total. I've not run windows disk cleanup on the drive since this is disabled by default on server 2008 and I don't really fancy installing the "Desktop Experience" package. If this was just <=15gb I probably wouldn't care, but it is over 10% of the entire drive that is missing. Any thoughts or insight into this would be much appreciated? .... And before anybody says it I've checked and the recycle bin is empty. Thanks, DB
There may be subfolders that need you to grant admin access to view the properties of, so get skipped when you are checking the properties of the root folders. Download and run windirstat and it'll tell you where all your space is being used.
@xTatic "Automatically manage paging file size for all drives" is ticked at the moment. I can see, by unticking this that there is only a paging file on drive C. The drive in question has no paging file. @Edwards - I've already run WinDirStat as mentioned in my first post. I sumed the total and confirmed this to be 1093gb. I make this to be about 1.06tb which is the same figure windows got to when selecting all folders on the drive and viewing properties. @Corky42 - I did run ChkDsk against the drive overnight, however in my half asleep state it would appear I somehow accidentally ran it against the wrong drive. I'm running it again now against the correct drive. It seems to be incredibly slow though. I'll report back once its finished.
http://superuser.com/questions/2414...ence-between-used-space-size-and-size-on-disk and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2008/07/03/ntfs-misreports-free-space.aspx
So chkdsk finally completed. No issues found and I checked for file system and bad sectors. So I went through that msdn blog. Using the chkdsk output. Step 1 I had already done. Ensuring I could see all files including hidden or protected OS file and folders. For Step 2 - Based on that article I calculated my metadata usage to be a measly 268.87mb As part of this step I noticed that my user files where occupying 1.21tb in 2441 files. This matches what disk manager etc is telling me. When I select and right click on all contents of the drive it tells me its 1.06tb in 2116 files. By manually navigating through the drive I did eventually find a folder which I didn't have access to and took ownership of this. In short, I record TV directly to the media centers internal hard drive. At 3am twice a week the media center turns on and sends these files over to the server and then deletes the locally stored contents due to space constraints. I did actually try to get it to write direct to the server, but MCE didn't want to use anything but local storage. This process backs up the entire Recorded TV folder using rsync. As part of this it was backing up the following directory. Recorded TV\TempRec\TempSBE. I hadn't noticed this subfolder "TempSBE" before because it is a hidden protected operating system folder. From googling this appears to be Windows Media Centers Temporary Live TV stream. Since this isn't causing the local system any issues I simply amended the backup client. I managed to fix the issue by simply amending my rsync command to exclude all files except where extension is ".wtv". Something I would’ve done from the start had I realised MCE would be so sneaky as to hide Live TV Stream's as protected OS files. After deleting the TempSBE folder from the Server the drive now shows 303gb free. Thanks a bunch "faugusztin" that second article helped a lot. Its been bookmarked. Also thanks to everyone else who chimed in. Issue Resolved
