Cloned my HD: BIG problems

Please, please help me out if you know anything about this sort of problem.

I bought a WD 320gb, 5400rpm ATA hard drive with which to upgrade the 80gb, 4200rpm HD in my old HP DV1000 (cto) laptop. On the advice of a poster here I downloaded the trial version of Acronis and backed up the old HD, creating an image on an external HD (a 1TB Samsung drive).

Everything went fine at first. I cloned the old HD, swapped the 320gb HD into my laptop, booted from a CD that Acronis helped me to create, and restored the backed-up image (which was 74gb) to the 320gb HD.

But when I rebooted the laptop, the "new" HD only registered as 74gb. Apparently this is a fairly common problem; apparently I copied LBA-3 and had it hide the HPA. (I don't actually know what that means at all; I just read it on this site: http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm )

I have been unable to utilize or even understand most of the prescriptions that have been given on some other sites' threads. I tried to utilize a program called HDD Capacity Restore, but when I click on my new HD the program keeps on telling me that "more than one device is detected on the channel with the selected device. The device has to be on a single channel." Apparently my CD/DVD drive is on the same channel as the HD, and I have no idea how to fix that. I really don't want to monkey around with the insides of the computer and connecting cables.

To make matters worse, I can't even use the Acronis program any more b/c it's telling me that the trial period is expired, even though I only set it up today! I assume that might be b/c when I swapped in the 320gb HD the time/date setting went back to 2004, and even though I've now updated it the program still tells me that it's expired. I have emailed Acronis about the problem.

Is there some way in which I can wipe the 320gb HD completely and, assuming I can get Acronis working again, just re-restore the cloned image correctly, so that the HD will register 320gb (well, 298 gb) instead of 74gb?

I hope that I've conveyed the problem clearly enough, and I hope that someone out there can help me. Thanks in advance.

 

Acronis did exactly what you asked it to--it cloned a 80gb partition to a 320gb drive.

All you need to do now is expand the 74gb partition to use the entire drive. How you do that depends on your operating system, which you never mention.

 

Sorry-- my OS is Windows XP. Any suggestions on how to expand the partition to use the entire drive given that it's XP?

 

Google Gparted, burn the ISO, expand the 74GB partition, done.

 

Gparted is a good option for XP. Vista and Windows 7 allow expanding partitions in disk manager.

There are several more here:

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/partitioneditors.shtml

 

Thanks, guys. After reading gerry's first response I googled a bit more and found EASEUS Partition Master, which is freeware. Just installed it and simply dragged the partition from 74gb to the full drive size. Applied it. Now in My Computer the drive shows up as 298gb, with 228gb free.

Can it really have been that easy? I'm telling you, I spent three hours this afternoon googling solutions and I found tons of forums where people were complaining about problems similar to mine, and the proposed solutions were SO friggin' complicated. Have I really just fixed it with EASUS?

 

under xp, open up a run window by pressing WinKey+R.

Type "compmgmt.msc"

You should find the Disk management on the bottom of the left pane. Expand it and find your disk on the right. If you right click it, you can choose to extend the partition to fill your whole disk.

 

Well, it seems it's that easty. But wait a sec, doesn't Acronis have a function to resize the partition?

BTW someone here in the forums saw that WD is offering a free Acronis 2009 download for those who have WD hard drives. Just look into their site.

 

You can extend that partition now with one of the many partition manager programs, when you cloned the hdd or you restored the image Acronis will allow you to do a direct copy including the partition size or you could have told the program to clone the data but use a new larger partition.

At the point your at it will be faster and easier to just extend the partition rather than do the restore over again.

 

Thank you! After reading your response I found a copy of Acronis for WD on the WD site (have no idea how it's particularly different from the other Acronis program), uninstalled my "expired" trial version and installed the WD Acronis program, and it doesn't even seem to be an expiring trial program! So now I'm good to go. Much appreciation to everyone who responded.

 

Glad to help. though you might want to thank deeastman on this thread, since that's where I found out about that WD Acronis thingy.

 

You're all repped.