New Hard Drive

[zandre88]

Hey everyone,

Just recently purchased a new hard drive and came here for advice on imaging the old HDD data onto the new one. It was suggested to use either Acronis or Ghost. I decided to go with Acronis. So today the new hard drive arrived and I went through all the steps of imaging the old drive's data onto the new one. Everything went well and I've currently got the new HDD in my computer. It fired up just fine. However I do have one question.

I went to the drive's properties ( C: ) and it still is stating that I only have 64.2gb's of space on the drive. The recovery partition ( D: ) is also the same (9.99gb) but I don't mind that as I wanted the added space available for my C: drive.

Is the space there and the computer is just not recognizing it?

Or am I just using about 85gigs of the 320gb on my new HDD?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[zandre88]

Well after doing a little bit of googling I found this tutorial which is a different route than what I followed. However still being what I like to call an intermediate noob I don't quite understand certain parts. First of all I purchased a USB to SATA adapter so that I could transfer the data from my old HDD drive to my new one. I believe if I plug the new drive into my USB through the adapter Windows recognizes it an external drive which is part where my knowledge gets fuzzy and I don't have a total grasp on what exactly this tutorial is expressing.

From the tutorial...

"First of all, you should already have the new, replacement hard drive mounted in either an external USB- or FireWire-connected enclosure, or mounted within the laptop itself (in something like a ThinkPad's Ultrabay).

- Does the cord I have suffice? Or will I need to purchase an enclosure?

When cloning to another internal hard drive, the process can be done within Windows. However, when cloning to an external drive, you need to have prepared an emergency boot disk within True Image and to have booted the notebook from it.

- What exactly does this mean? How would I go about doing this? Anything else I need or should know?

Note that it's not possible to create a bootable disk on an external drive in Windows because of a flag that Windows sets that identifies the drive as external. True image will not warn you about this, and the documentation is not clear, either. We had to learn this from tech support."

- Again what does this mean? Will I not be able to accomplish this with the cord I have? I only have one hard drive bay so I don't see any other way of accomplishing this unless the drive is external. Any help?

Here is the tutorial:

Tutorial: How to Clone a Laptop Hard Drive with Acronis True Image Home 2009

If anyone would mind reading this and maybe explaining a bit more in lay-mens terms and whether I'll be able to accomplish this with what I have?

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help.

 

[zmatt]

The reason you don't have the full size of the drive available is because when you imaged the drive you also gave ti the same partitions. The extra space is there, you just have to get to it. The easiest way would be to use a partition utility like partition magic and to re size your C: partition to fit the whole drive. I'm guessing you don't want the recovery partition? If so then it is a pretty simple process.

Partition Magic will show your your drive with all of the partitions and free space. You literally just click on the partitions and tell it what you want to do. First i would delete the recover partition. then i would re size, or expand (depending on what the program calls it) the C: partition to fit the whole drive. I quick reboot and you should be good to go.

 

[zandre88]

Well I'm running Vista and I've heard partition magic does not work with it. Any other programs out there that are as easy PartitionMagic that can be run with Vista?

Thanks zmatt...Hadn't really though of going that route. I have about 225gb of unallocated space.

 

[Hefemeister]

gparted.
GParted -- Download

 

[zandre88]

gparted.
GParted -- Download

Thanks. Worked flawlessly.