Have you ever needed to know when an NTFS was created partition or when windows activated a drive for the first time and made it available for use?
One possible reason you may want to know this information is to want to see if a disc warranty has expired. Although there are no easy and easy ways to find out the date of creation of a partition in a Windows environment, see below for how you can find this information for 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 one apartment 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 fundamentals link tracking service data) used to maintain information about the creation and movement of linked files across NTFS partitions.
- Indexing Service databases (Index service databases) used for fast file search.
- Shadow Copy(Screenshots) created by Volume Snapshot Service, which backs up files specified 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.
Για να εμφανίσει ο explorer σας τα κρυφά αρχεία και τους κρυφούς φακέλους θα πρέπει, αφού τον ανοίξετε, να πάτε Προβολή > Επιλογές > Προβολή και εκεί να ξεμαρκάρετε την choice “Απόκρυψη προστατευμένων αρχείων λειτουργικού συστήματος (προτείνεται)”. Πατήστε “Ναι” στην προnotice that appears and then press “Apply”
Then use File Explorer to browse and access the drive or partition whose creation date you want to see. For example, if you want to see for drive C, enter the beginning of C from the file explorer (in the root of C) and find the System Volume Information folder. Right-click on it and from the menu that appears select "Properties".
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.