weird storage problem (identical external drives, Win7 x64)

Turbonium

Platinum Member
Mar 15, 2003
2,154
82
91
Situation:

- 2 identical external drives, in identical enclosures
- identical file systems (NTFS)
- both connected to the same system (Win7 x64)

Both drives have the same files on them. I mean this quite literally in that I recently formatted the one drive, and copy-pasted the contents of the other drive onto it. I double-checked and both drives have the same number of files and folders, right down to the last byte (both in terms of size and size on disk, as reported by the OS).

And yet, in Windows Explorer...

drive 1: 386 GB free space (of 931 GB)
drive 2: 496 GB free space (of 931 GB)

If it matters, both drives have indexing enabled, and are set for quick-removal. There are no hidden files or folders I'm not seeing on either drive.

I ran a checkdisk on "drive 1", with no errors found. Just finished defragmenting it (pass 1 consolidation took over 3 hours, strangely), and it's still the same.

I have no idea what's causing this.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
33
86
It's a long-shot, but any shadows on there? You can chck by typing this form an elevated command prompt:
Code:
vssadmin list shadows
And in making sure I got that right, I discovered I had a couple persistent ones I was unaware of. Huh.
 

Turbonium

Platinum Member
Mar 15, 2003
2,154
82
91
It's a long-shot, but any shadows on there? You can chck by typing this form an elevated command prompt:
Code:
vssadmin list shadows
And in making sure I got that right, I discovered I had a couple persistent ones I was unaware of. Huh.
It says it found one, but I don't even really know what a shadow copy is. Is it possible I accidentally created one when messing around with Backup and Restore (perhaps before I disabled it)? It says the shadow copy has existed for a year now, around when I first built this system.

Also: how does it know what drive to check? I mean, between my system drive and the external? I find it weird that the command didn't ask for a directory/drive to check in.
 

Turbonium

Platinum Member
Mar 15, 2003
2,154
82
91
Alright, circumvented the vssadmin context issues by going to System Properties in Windows, and manually deleting the shadow from within the menus. Apparently, despite it being "Off" for that drive, it still had somehow made a shadow at some point.