320GB WD SCORPIO only registering as 54.4gb no matter what I do

I bought a 320gb wd HD and i decided to clone it from my own HD which is a 60GB hd
I cloned using Acronis true image 2009 and it took a day as I was using the HD on a usb caddie but the drive didnt boot up after that and it was only registering as 54.4gb no matter how i formatted it or deleted the partition

I have Acronis disk director that I used for this also and I updated the BIOS
Can someone tell me what i can do ?

I was following this but it went horribly wrong

 

How new / old are the computer and the USB enclosure? Something is running very slowly.

My first thoughts are (i) you failed to select the option to expand the partition(s) to fill the new HDD; (ii) the BIOS does not support 320GB and (iii) the enclosure does not support 320GB.

What does your BIOS report as the HDD capacity of the 320GB HDD? It should see the full disk capacity irrespective of the size of the partition containing the data. Computers older than about 5 years may only be about to address 137GB.

John

 

Yes It did before I did anything to it and it was recognised fully by the caddie too
its an inspiron 9400 (2 years)
Should I try again?

 

If you slap an image of a 60GB volume onto a 320GB hard disk, you will only create a partition of a size identical to your original HD. You need to use a bootable LiveCD such as Gparted or Vista's Disk Management tool to expand the existing partition to span the entire capacity of the new hard disk.

 

I dont have vista only xp and i had trouble downloading gparted
can anyone help with that also?

I might just try the clone again looking for the option to expand the partition to fit the HD but now I'm not sure whether it will work

 

+1 for g-parted, but if you are adjusting the Vista partition (not sure about XP) you may need to have a repair CD/DVD on hand as some paths may need to be adjusted afterwards (you can download a legal free vista repair disc online).

edit: you can just DL the ubuntu live-cd (i recommend 32-bit since I had trouble with the g-parted utility that came with the 64-bit version)

 

You can't do anything to the filesystem while it is mounted; in other words, you cannot extend the partition while you are running XP. Gparted or a Linux LiveCD are your two best bets.

http://www.ubuntu.com/

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/

Burn either of these (Gparted is preferable since it is smaller) as CD images (ISOs) in order to boot from them. What problems did you have downloading Gparted?

 

{Cough}

It might be a good idea to check the size of the main partition before sending a newbie off to play with Linux liveCDs and repartitioning tools....

@delsie:

Put the new drive in the enclosure.

Connect the enclosure to a working computer.

Load the Disk Management console (on Vista: Start > Computer > Manage > Storage > Disk Management).

Take a screenshot and post it here.

@Bog:

Vista's DMC can resize mounted partitions, including the boot partition, without additional tools.

 

I would redo the cloning making sure that the option to expand the partition(s) to fill the disk is selected. However, if the cloned disk did not boot there must be another glitch in the cloning process so this needs to be checked as well.

Make sure that you used the right option (transfer the system to a new disk) and not the option to create an image.

John

 

I did this and the imaged HD booted fine but when I used acronis disk manager or vista disk manager to edit the size, it just didn’t work
I downloaded the WD tool to wipe the hard drive
I started the tool to write zero's to the entire drive and threw up an error after about 20%

 

ok after wring zeros the the drive failed I now have created a partition on the disks using western digital tools and it is still only seeing the exact same size as my orginal HD

 

Wiping doesn't mean you wipe out a partition. It means you write zeroes or ones over free space. It's covering your tracks, not disk maintenance.

You probably need to scan disk and recover your bad sectors. Then look through your Acronis lit. Most partitioning software allow you to eliminate or enlarge partitions w/o losing data.

 

I sucessfully wrote zero's to the drive using the data lifeguard tools from WD
its still only seeing approc 54 GB ;(

 

does anyone have any more advise i'm really stuck
i tried using UBCD (ultimate book CD) but I wasnt sure which tool to use or how to use it

 

Theres no data on this disk to loose I have reformatted several times since i cloned it

 

I have booted using gparted i was burning it to cd wrong
and the resizing option isnt there
I know i have damaged the start of the harddisk in some way and i just need to know what to do to fix

 

out of curiosity, did you do this?

if you can't post a screenie, what does the schema for that new disk look like?

 

it still just shows the same size and doent give the option to resize!

 

and what's the full model number of the drive?