I have a NTFS partition now the size of the partition seems to be wrong. Is there an easy way to fix this?

Question

So I I resized a partition and now the partition table seems like it is screwed up. I am running Windows 7. When I open the "Disk Management" The table at the top of the screen show the disk as 139GB. Down below, in the graphical partition representation, it shows as 212GB. It is truly 212GB. The rest of the OS sees it as 139GB... why is this inconsistent two pieces of the same Disk management app are showing different sizes for this partition. Is there a way to repair this? Manually or automatically?

Answer 1

It's possible for the partition to be a different size than the NTFS volume inside the partition. NTFS maintains a count of the allocation units in the volume irrespective of the partition size. Having an NTFS volume show as larger than the partition its in is bad mojo, but smaller is no big deal.

It's unclear to me how your machine would've gotten that way, but it's certainly possible.

I'd recommend running CHKDSK on the volume to be sure it's healthy, and, of course, being sure that you've got a good backup before proceeding.

• Boot your Windows 7 installation CD and at the "Install Windows" dialog, press Shift-F10 to open a command prompt.

• At the command prompt, run diskpart.

• At the DISKPART> prompt, enter list disk to see the disks on your machine. You'll get something like:

    Disk ###  Status      Size     Free     Dyn  Gpt
    --------  ----------  -------  -------  ---  ---
    Disk 0    Online        96 GB      0 B

• Enter select disk # where # is the disk number listed for your hard disk drive (most liekly 0).

• Enter list partition. You'll get something like:

  Partition ###  Type              Size     Offset
  -------------  ----------------  -------  -------
  Partition 1    Primary             96 GB    32 KB

• Enter 'select partition #' where # is the partition number associated with your "C:" "drive".

• Finally, use the command extend. This will grow the NTFS volume to fill the partition.

Answer 2

I can only guess here, but I assume that your partition is only 139GB in size. You can resize it by using Acronis Disk Director or any other tool that allows to resize partitions.

Best wishes, Fabian

Answer 3

The discrepancy makes me think HD problems. Backup first, even before running chkdsk! Copy the data to another physical drive, make an image of the drive if you want a 2nd backup. Run chkdsk with verify/repair. If the drive has underlying issues you'll want to deal with that before making any changes.

If chkdsk comes back clean or minor errors found and repaired but size mistmatch still exists then I would boot off a live CD live CD like System Rescue CD and see how it lists the partition size. You can use ParImage on that cd to change the partition size if needed but that may be addressing a symptom and not the cause. Acronis has also great products for imaging and changing partition sizes, not free but affordable for workstation OS's.

SystemRescueCD