Windows 10: All files on my 4TB hard drive appear to be hidden

Two days ago I noticed that my 4TB drive was no longer showing the bar in Computer that shows you how much of the drive has been used. It simply showed the drive name and that it was NTFS formatted.

When I tried to access it, I got a "D:\ Access Denied" message.

I checked the permissions for the drive and it said "Ownership: ??". I assigned ownership and Full control to theUsers and Administrators groups but it was having trouble applying them. After trying twice, it eventually said the permissions forUsers was corrupted. I deleted the those permissions and it finally let me access the drive but it appears to blank.

I scanned the drive with file recovery software Recuva. After a 7 hour scan I was able to see all of my files and it judged them to all be in excellent condition and I was able to recover them all to an external driver over the course of nearly 24 hours.

After doing that I ran chkdsk on the drive and it reported back the following.

" 242998147 KB total disk space.
190331760 KB in 757104 files.
541372 KB in 110744 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
1463027 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
50661988 KB available on disk."

From everything I can gather, the drive seems to be fine and all my files are there but drive Windows can't see them. I'm assuming it's a problem with the drives metadata and I'm wondering what the best course of action would be.

:)

 

New 4TB Hard Drive Read As 1.6TB

The 4TB drive only shows 1.6TB, there always are two reasons for that:

1.The 4TB hard drive has been initialized to a wrong partition table. If you find a formatted hard drive not showing full capacity, which is mainly because you format the
4TB hard drive to MBR partition table. As we all know, MBR partition table cannot address to the space that exceeds 2TB. As a result, to use a full capacity of a hard drive that is larger than 2TB, you need to initialize it to GPT partition table
via
an MBR to GPT converter.

2.The 4TB external hard drive does not connect correctly. Some portable hard drive and USB hard drive are designed to connect a PC via a USB port. If you install the USB hard drive to your computer, the hard drive capacity detecting may
become an issue. An accepted explanation is the controller board of USB hard drive breaks the 2TB limitation, yet Windows internal device controller does not. Therefore, you need to additional hardware to make the installed USB/portable hard drive showing
full capacity. In that case, all you need to do is connecting the 4TB USB hard drive via USB port.

 

Stored files in Hard Drive

You can use Windows search. Just search for *.* on a desired drive. When list is done just arrange them by size LOL.

You can do it via command line as well and make an output text file showing files and their sizes (but without arrangement)

 

Windows 7 and 4TB Hard Drive

I had the same problem. No matter what I did I could not see beyond 1687 GB
* Disk 2 Online 1678 GB 1677 GB *

This will be a secondary drive for me too.
I tried all of the above to no avail.

When I was ready to give up, thinking my 6-year old system (Alienware X58 with Asus P6T Deluxe MB with Marvell Raid Controller) would not handle the drive, I went through WD pages about the drive, and saw Windows 7 support as long as you have the latest Intel drive:

Do I need a special driver to install a WD Advanced Format Drive on an Intel chipset?

If your operating system is either Windows 7 or Vista, we recommend the following for maximum performance in all situations:

• For Intel chipset, use the latest Intel driver version 9.6 or later. Please visit Intel for the latest driver downloads at http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-031502.htm

This surprised me since I still see the WD Green 4TB drive appearing during bios boot disk list with 1687 GB.

Hope this helps other people looking for this solution.