Please help; DIY notebook hard drive upgrade gone wrong.

Hey all, this may be too software-based but it is a notebook question.

The 60GB drive on my m1210 is *way* too small. I finally bit the bullet and got a 160GB 5400 rpm drive, Norton Ghost, and a 2.5" SATA USB enclosure.

I know the drive is OK. Ghost saw the entire, unformatted 160GB drive correctly. I duplicated my old drive onto the new using Ghost's Copy Drive option-- I figured I'd get a 60GB C partition, and I'd be left with 90GB of unpartitioned space, which i could partition into D afterwards. I immediately swapped the drives.

One problem: There is no unpartitioned space on my "160GB" drive, according to Windows Disk Management, Norton Ghost, and any other program I look at. It has transformed into a 60GB drive. I tried "fixMBR" in Windows Recovery Console, and also flashed the BIOS to the latest revision. No dice. My drive shrank.

Where the hell did my unpartitioned space go?! Please tell me if I'm just dumb... I'm worried about my new drive...

 

Is the software orginal or p2p download? I would contact symantec.

 

Right-click on My Computer and click Manage (assuming you are using Windows XP). Then double-click Storage and go into Disk Management. You'll see your drives in there and how big the partition(s) are. What do you see?

 

you tried partitionmagic? i used ghost once ever, all i wanted it to do was clone a drive onto a partition i had created. it ended up deleting everything in that drive and then creating a partition for the cloned data. while its a useful tool, it is a symantec product, which means it will screw up at some point.

 

Hmm ... I'm a little scared now. According to Disk Management my drive is 60 GB (54.43GB with 30MB unpartitioned space). As well as anything else I've tried to look at the disk with, including booting from the Windows CD & etc.

I don't really know if the copy of Ghost I have is legit; my family has piles of CDs with serial codes. But my Ghost is working just fine. It's more likely I messed up on a setting-- I think I checked "copy MBR', which is why I tried FixMBR in Windows Recovery, but that didn't help me.

I mean, can I wipe the whole drive and start over? I don't mind; I have the old one still. What should I do to erase the whole 160GB drive? At this point anything I do will just mess with the 60GB partition, I think.

I just don't understand how 100GB of space can just disappear and not get recognized as 'unpartitioned space', inside or outside of windows. What the hell could cause this?

 

I wonder if during the copying you included something which makes normal software think the new HDD is also 60GB. The extra space is there but has been concealed. Do you have Partition Magic or Acronis Disk director in your software collection? If so, what can they see.

Otherwise it is best to start again and you might either want to use different cloning software or set up a new HDD from scratch.

If you want to start with a clean HDD then the manufacturers website usually include a utility which will do reformatting. If you have a Seagate HDD then you can get DiskWizard which includes a cloning function.

John

 

Did you check what the BIOS itself reports seeing? You talked about flashing the BIOS but did not mention specifically what the BIOS thinks the drive is.

I suggest you proceed with much caution in trying to fix this problem.

 

You made 2 partitions (60 and 90) but you only formatted the 60gb one. If you don't format that 90gb part, you will never see it in windows. It will just remain an unpartitioned section of your hard drive.

So no it didn't dissapear, it's just not formated and will not be seen by windows, but if you go into the bios, or boot up a windows cd you will see the unpartitioned space.

 

Do you have mediadirect in your computer? If yes, then it might be the MediaDirect HPA problem. Read this:

http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/mediadirect.htm