How did my hard drive turn into a TARDIS?

Raymond Chen

A customer observed that the entry for a network drive looked liked this in My Computer, well, except that there was a network drive icon instead of ASCII art.

How is it possible for a 2.5GB drive to have 3.81TB free? While there have certainly been examples of Explorer showing confusing values the reason for the strange results was, at least this time, not Explorer’s fault.

This particular network drive actually reported (via Get­Disk­Free­Space­Ex) that it had more free space than drive space. Explorer is dutifully reporting the information it was given, because it doesn’t try to second-guess the file system. If a network drive wants to report that it is a TARDIS, then it’s a TARDIS.

Raymond Chen

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