Ever needed to know when an NTFS partition was created or when Windows first activated a drive and made it available for use?
One possible reason you might want to know this information is to see if a drive has expired from its factory warranty. Although there are no easy and convenient ways to find out in a Windows environment the date creationof a partition, see below how you can find these information by yourself.
The easiest way to tell when a partition was created is to look at the folder System Volume Information. This folder is at the beginning of every partition on every disk that Windows has access to. It is created automatically by Windows when it detects a new partition and stores basic things like:
- System Restore Points created by Windows for this partition (if configured to create them).
- Distributed Link Tracking Service databases (Managed Detection Service Databases) used to store information about creating and moving linked files across all NTFS partitions.
- Indexing Service databases (Index service databases) used for fast file search.
- Shadow Copy(Snapshot Copies) created by the Volume Snapshot Service, which it builds backups of files that have been determined by System Restore or Windows Backup.
The System Volume Information folder is by defaultchoice hidden and you need to set File Explorer to show you the hidden files and folders of the operating system.
In order for your explorer to show the hidden files and hidden folders, after opening it, you have to go to View> Options> View and uncheck the option "Hide protected operating system files (recommended)". Click "Yes" in the warning that appears and then click "Apply"
Then use File Explorer to browse and access the drive or partition whose creation date you want to view. For example, if you want to look for the C drive, go to the beginning of C from File Explorer (at the root of C) and find the System Volume Information folder. Right-click on it and select "Properties" from the menu that appears.
Alternatively, you can also select the folder and press Alt + Enter on your keyboard.
The previous action opens a window called System Volume Information Properties. There, on the General tab, you will find a field called Created. The date and time on the right side is close (in many cases identical) to the date of creation of the apartment.
However, while this method is the easiest way to get a good idea of the date on which a partition was created, it can also display false data in some cases:
- If you did not create the partition directly from Windows then the System Volume Information folder was not created automatically from the beginning. The folder was created the first time Windows detected the new partition. If you ran Windows a few days after the partition was created, the creation date listed in the System Volume Information folder will be different from the actual creation date.
- If you only have one partition, which you used to install / remove / reinstall different operating systems, Windows displays the date the folder was created, not when the partition first existed.
- If the system clock is not set correctly when creating the partition, the date displayed by System Volume Information will also be incorrect.