Empty drives show 2 GB used, Explorer shows nothing

Solution 1:

Firstly, I doubt that those Windows disks are physical drives, I guess from their size that they are partitions, so you have partitioned your disk and now you probably find a bit disappointing that it takes some extra space of your drive.

Run command line as administrator and then:

vssadmin list shadowstorage /on=D:
vssadmin list shadowstorage /on=E:
vssadmin list shadowstorage /on=F:

It will show how much space did Windows Shadow Copy Storage take. See those articles for more detail:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5482/make-system-restore-use-less-space-in-windows-7/ http://www.howtogeek.com/123268/windows-hard-drive-wrong-capacity/

You can turn off shadow copy by writing in elevated command prompt:

powershell  

which starts a powershell prompt and then:

disable-computerrestore -drive "D:\"
disable-computerrestore -drive "E:\"
disable-computerrestore -drive "F:\"

Here is a link to technet manual and also this answer.

Solution 2:

Selecting all files and viewing their properties skips files that your user account doesn't have access to while viewing the disk properties reads the NTFS meta data and always shows the correct usage.

Run TreesizeFree (as admin) to see a better view of the disk space usage. Running it as admin shows hidden folders such as System Volume Information where system restore points and chkdsk logs are stored.

if this doesn't show the usage, it could be that the NTFS metadata/Master File Table (MFT) have grown. Run the tool ntfsinfo.exe to see the size of the NTFS metedata. On my drive the MFT is over 600MB:

NtfsInfo v1.2 - NTFS Information Dump
Copyright (C) 2005-2016 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals - www.sysinternals.com


Volume Size
-----------
Volume size            : 457876 MB
Total sectors          : 937730949
Total clusters         : 117216368
Free clusters          : 47031672
Free space             : 183717 MB (40% of drive)

Allocation Size
----------------
Bytes per sector       : 512
Bytes per cluster      : 4096
Bytes per MFT record   : 0
Clusters per MFT record: 0

MFT Information
---------------
MFT size               : 677 MB (0% of drive)
MFT start cluster      : 786432
MFT zone clusters      : 13913408 - 13933696
MFT zone size          : 79 MB (0% of drive)
MFT mirror start       : 2

Meta-Data files
---------------

This could cause your hidden usage.