Shadow Drive ate 60Gb of my G531GU SSD - storage nowhere to be found

[CyanXX7]

Hello, folks, excuse me for the possible ignorance I'm revealing, not the most tech person in the world - usually I do hold my own, not this time apparently, so I thank you for all the help in advance.

I just purchased a ROG STRIX III G531GU without OS installed, I've installed Win10 Home, configured everything in accordance to my preferences and had no idea what the shadow drive was, activated it and thought it was a fancy pen drive (Yes, I do know that's not what it is now). Then, I transferred some data there, to alleviate my 500Gb SSD drive only to realise that obviously, the Z: shadow drive was taking storage from C: - in fact around 60 Gb. I deleted the info from Z: but no storage was released back in C: in 'dynamic' fashion as announced - quite the contrary. I then decided to unpair the keystone and pair it again to try and reset the process, now I can't see Z: or the 60 Gb virtual partition anywhere - it completed disappeared... Any ideas how I can get my 60Gb back - I don't care about not being able to use the shadow drive again, but I really don't want to reinstall in 2 days and give up on what I've already done due to this stupid mistake and the obvious lack of info regarding this nearly useless feature...

[xeromist]

I'm not familiar with how the Shadow drive software works but did you try running disk cleanup on the drive including System Files? See if you can find the shadow drive software executable on the start menu or in program files and run it. Reinstalling would be a last resort because it could put things in an inconsistent state.

Finally, you may have to manually search for large files to see if it created a virtual file system somewhere that you can manually delete but that could be a pain.

[CyanXX7]

Thank you for your response, Xeromist, much appreciated!

Actually the situation changed - the shadow drive finally appeared, now revealing 211 Gb available, when my main drive only has 150 Gb available - on the disc management section things now appears like the last image below, 77,87 non attributed disk space, that's my Moby Dick right there - of course this for me is another language, it's new data but I don't know what the hell to do with it...

[xeromist]

I read elsewhere that the shadow drive software uses VHD files. Those can be provisioned for more space than they actually use. For example, I have a virtual machine that believes it is installed on a 120 GB HDD but it is currently only using 60GB of actual space. If I were to add files it would grow accordingly. So 150 vs 211 is nothing to worry about.

The 77GB is where my lack of knowledge about Shadow drive comes in. It could be that shadow drive dynamically resizes the partition on the virtual drive and is currently leaving 77GB as unallocated.

[CyanXX7]

I see. My only concern is that I might need that allocation space and might be forced to erase and install sooner or later, because of that - thank you very much for your insight.

[Joanne@ROG]

Hi,

Thank you for letting us know your problem on ROG Keystone shadow drive function.

1. Shadow drive is a dynamic VHD rather than a real extra partition disk. The situation you encountered is normal for a dynamic VHD. Even though the space of C drive can’t be released, but the space of shadow drive is still normally functioning, please don’t be worried about this.
2. Keystone is a switch of shadow drive to turn on the hidden storage area but never an extra hard drive space for users.
3. We know that it may still cause inconvenience to end users, so our team will add the function to release your C drive space by a more straight forward way, that is by restarting your PC.Users just need to restart their PC, and the C drive storage space information will be synchronized. This function will be released by later July 2020, please looking forward to it.

Thank you!

[CyanXX7]

Thank you very much for your response, Joanne - I'll be looking forward to that feature release. Do you believe that Armoury crate's CPU and GPU analysis tools will also be functional then, or am I the only one that is experiencing a software malfunction?

[sayangr]

joanne@asus ....
hello sir , is there any way to release some space from the shadow drive and use it in the windows drive ??