Hard Drive Size Not RecognisedClosed

Question

Hi,

I recently bought a new 320GB drive for my laptop to replace the 120GB original, I used Acronis to clone across my current HD to the new one which was mounted in an external usb enclosure. This process appeared to complete fine, and should have left the new drive bootable.

I swapped in the new drive, windows started to boot then blue screened. After swapping the drives back, the new drive appears to behaving as a perfectly normal 120GB drive, Computer Management sees it as a 120GB drive, Acronis sees it as a 120GB drive. I can format it, zero fill it, partition it, but nothing seems to register that it's a 320GB drive. Somehow Acronis made it register as the exact same size as the original drive that I was cloning from. I have no idea how it would do that.

Can anyone help please? Are there any programs that might recognise it as 320GB and be able to format it as such?

Thanks in advance guys,
Ben

xpcman · Answer

You can download Easeus Partition Manager it should fix things. You could add a second partition of 200 GB and keep Windows on the first 120 GB partition. If you used the free version of Acronis it does not resize the hard disk, only in the purchased program. 

https://download.cnet.com/EaseUS-Partition-Master-Free-Edition/3000-2248_4-10863346.html?tag=mncol%3Bpop&cdlPid=10982635

Morfoot · Answer

Thanks for your reply xpcman! I tried Easeus but it gave me the same answers as Disk Management, it thinks the drive is only 120GB with no unallocated space.

Checking the properties of the HD, it's shown as having 14410 cylinders and 255 heads, identical to the old drive, doing the maths that gives a total size of 120GB. Acronis seems to have changed the actual properties of the drive.

xpcman · Answer

Did you click on "Resize/move Partition"?

Select your C drive - click on Resize/Move Partition the window should show 200 GB of "unallocated space"  you want to resize the partition to 360 GB starting at the ending point of your 120GB.

Morfoot · Answer

Hey xpcman, I tried again but it shows no unallocated space, only a single 120GB partition. If I delete the partition it shows 120GB unallocated space and when I create a new partition, the maximum size is 120GB. Thanks for your suggestion though.

GGGT · Answer

See this link re XP only recognizing part of a drive 

https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/accessing-more-than-137gb-on-large-hard-disks-read.36678/

Morfoot · Answer

Hey guys,

Thanks for all your help. In the end, I found out the issue. It occurs when you try and clone some Dell HDD's, they've got hidden system restore partitions which cloning programs don't read properly, corrupting the drive you're cloning to. I tried sending it back to Western Digital, they factory reconditioned it and gave it a new serial etc, it didn't fix the issue at all. The only thing that worked was Dariks Boot and Nuke, wish I'd tried it first, great utility.

Thanks again for your suggestions.

Ben

Hard Drive Size Not Recognised

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