Hard Drive size ridiculously far off, Disk Management shows full drive size

Ok, I've searched all over every forum I can think of and I can't find anything anywhere. I apologize if this has been answered on this site; I couldn't find it.

My C: drive has been displaying a size of around 60 gb with 40 free even though it's a 300 gb drive. I thought the issue would resolve with a clean install, so I did that. Now I have a fresh install and i need to reinstall everything, but the problem isn't fixed. Below are some screen shots of the drive size:



This is the size Windows is showing ^



Disk Management, showing my C: Drive's full size ^

Any suggestions of how I can reclaim this space?? I've tried a few things already to no avail. If you need any more information about my computer to help, let me know. This is pretty annoying, 'cause I want to use that extra space to install Ubuntu.

Oh, I just remembered. When I look at the drive in Paragon Partition Manager, it shows the full Drive size, but says that the space that is missing from Windows is in use.... I have no idea how this happened.

You have two drives of exactly the same size?

Where did the recovery partition come from?

The computer window may not be showing a partition that is empty, but according to what you show, you are using the 286 G partition as the boot partition.

The two attachments do not seem to agree about your system. Maybe you should try rebooting and checking them again.

You have run chkdsk?

I ran chkdsk before the clean install and it did nothing. I also ran a similar utility from Paragon Partition Manager. I'll run chkdsk again and see what happens.

And in reply to the first post, I have restarted numerous times, reinstalled windows, and tried anything else I can think of to fix this and the results are always the same. The recovery partition comes preinstalled with my computer, which is a Gateway NV5214u.

And yes, this drive is the boot partition which contains my OS and I'm utterly baffled as to why the two images of the same drive don't agree.

I'll see what happens with chkdsk.

Please post the screenshot from Paragon main window.

What does it say when you rt click the C drive in Paragon and select Properties?

I ran chkdsk, which did not find any errors.

Here's the Partition Manager Properties page. I wasn't sure which tab you wanted to see, so here's all three:

The General Tab:




The File System Tab:




And, lastly, the Advanced Tab:

Since you have the DEMO version of PM10 , you won't be able to do much with it.

It shows the drive is OK - seems explorer hasn't registered it correctly.

In Disk Management, rt click the C drive, shrink it by 5gb or so.

Rt the 5gb Unallocated space you just created , and make another ntfs partition - accept the drive letter it offers, select Quick format. It will be an Extended partition as it is the 4th one .

Now see what Windows Explorer shows.

Assuming that has fixed the issue, just delete the 5gb partition and extend C again ( in Disk Management)

Hope it helps.

Well, I'm thinking that would be a fix, but it returns this error every time: "The parameter is incorrect." I don't think I need to post a screenshot, as the error message doesn't offer any other information. It is reading the size of the volume properly, but the "amount of space to shrink in MB" field says I can only shrink by 9751 MB? Would getting the full version of partition manager make anything easier?

I'm writing this from a live cd of Ubuntu right now. I'm currently running the partition manager which is letting me do what you suggested. It is also scanning the drive for inconsistencies. Hopefully this can do the trick. If not, I think I'll just try to format the whole drive and start the 7 installation from scratch again tomorrow. Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

when you do a clean install, remove all partitions first, win 7 builds a small restore partition