Windows Server 2012 R2 Explorer Reports Wrong Disk Size?!?

Windows_Server_2012_R2_Logo

I have been struggling to fix this rather weird disk space issue for quite some time now. Basically, underlying thin provisioned disk on vSphere 5.5 was extended by additional 5GB (from 125 to 130GB) and expanded using Disk Management from within the OS as per the normal routine. No problems thus far BUT Explorer in Windows Server 2012 R2 was not reporting the increased space and was still showing the 125GB total size! How odd. Here is the screenshot for illustration purposes showing Disk Management and Windows Explorer both reporting different values!

Windows_Server_2012_R2_Explorer_Reports_Wrong_Disk_Size_1

I must have done the disk space increase from vSphere and extension from the guest OS hundreds of times and never had any real issues. There are tons of potential solutions to this problem, quite a few posted here:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2008/07/03/ntfs-misreports-free-space.aspx

but in my case neither worked. I didn’t want to install any 3rd party software like Partition Magic either so was stuck for a while before finally figuring it out. Good old diskpart came to my rescue! All I had to do was, list my volumes, select the volume to extend and issue extend filesystem command to get me sorted:

Windows_Server_2012_R2_Explorer_Reports_Wrong_Disk_Size_2

Disk Management was in perfect sync with Windows Explorer too – both showing 130GB of total space:

Windows_Server_2012_R2_Explorer_Reports_Wrong_Disk_Size_3

It’s amazing what you can figure out on your first day back at work in 2016!

Happy New Year to everyone too 🙂

5 thoughts on “Windows Server 2012 R2 Explorer Reports Wrong Disk Size?!?

  1. Vince

    Thanks a million for posting this! I just ran into this issue for the first time and your solution worked like a charm. Big time Kudos!!!

  2. Pingback: L'explorateur n'affiche pas la bonne taille de disque - TechSpace

  3. hawkbox

    Just ran into this myself with an Azure VM and it was baffling me. The diskpart command worked a treat.

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