I think I found something...I don't know what Index # is but it changes for Drive E. This Index column seems to have something to do with sorting as you can see from the screen caps.
In the first cap for the first time you can see H and I are mis-sorted. That hasn't recurred since. I was using a disk docking station and had recently removed I and re-inserted a different disk that assigned G & I. But you can see the index # isn't what I woluld expect it to be based on a Drive letter sort.
Index is just the order the items appear in the list. You can use it to select a range of items by number when using the keyboard, or to help count things. It doesn't affect the sort order; it's affected by it instead.
Does turning off Preferences / Folders / Virtual Folders / This PC / Show empty disk drives make any difference? That's the only uncommon thing I can see there really.
No difference. It took 14 seconds to re-sort. This is just such an odd problem. There's nothing special about drive E except it has the pagefile on it.
I was in DiskManager and decided to sort by Free Space just out of curiousity and what???? Different drive out-of-order but still that's weird.
If it’s affecting the Windows Disk Management list as well, I suspect one of those drives is (sometimes?) returning invalid free space information which is confusing the sort algorithms.
Do the free space values match the approximate space the respective drives should have?
Is the free space amount changing while you’re looking at it? That might explain why the sort order changes after a few seconds.
No such luck. The free space is the same before and after the re-sort and it matches what's in Disk Management. However; the consistent mis-sorted drive in Disk Management appears to be I vs DO's E. Just as a reminder E is one of 3 drives on the NVRAM while I is a single USB connected drive. Not that either makes any sense.
Nice try though and it would have explained the problem.
Just thinking this through a bit. Everything in Windows is a reaction to an action. When I click the top of the column it sorts the data but what would cause it to resort it once it's been sorted? Shouldn't that action be completed after the first sort?
