Whoa! 320 GB Down to 90 GB?

I just bought a brand new Seagate 320 GB 7200.3 hard drive and tried to clone my current hard drive onto it by using the Seagate DiskWizard software. When all is set and done I noticed I only have roughly 90 GB of disk space, exactly the same amount as my current one. There is not unallocated space, and it says it's 100% free but only shows 90 GB. What just happened? How do I get the other 230 GB back?

 

You shouldnt clone or what ever its better to start fresh and use a flash driver,sd card,etc to copy over important files.But that's just from personal experience.

 

Cloning it created a partition the same size as the old drive. Go to Start Menu, right click on computer, go to manage, and you should see the virtual disk manager. Extend the partition into the unallocated space.

 

That's the thing, I don't have any unallocated space!!

 

Wipe-flash-reload-remove thats all i can say...

 

Try this tool: HDD Capacity Restore Tool.

I got a 1TB drive and it only showed 30GB free. I ran this tool and it fixed it no problem.

Of course backup before you do so. But it sounds like you still have original drive with all stuff on it.

 

does the above tool work on vista?

 

Yes it does, but apparently only 32-bit.

Check out here:
http://blog.atola.com/restoring-factory-hard-drive-capacity/

and search for Vista. It says supported OS: 32-bit XP/Vista/2003.

I don't know if it will run on 64-bit or not though. It may, but just not "supported".

 

Thanks a lot for the suggested software - it seems to work for this kind of problem. Unfortunately my desktop is 64 bit so I can't run it, and it won't recognize the drive when it's mounted via an USB enclosure.

 

I don't know why it won't work for 64-bit, that's unfortunate. Only thing i can recommend is find a PC that has 32-bit on it. You'll have to do a direct connection to their sata port to have it work.

Only other option I can think of is a VistaPE disk and use 32-bit install. You'll need a 32-bit Vista disk, but your existing product key should work fine (if even needed for VistaPE). You will be happy with making the disk anyhow for accessing system resources in emergency situations.

Or absolute worse case scenario, if you need to get this disk running, is if you have another spare disk, any size really, take out existing hard drive, and install Vista or even XP 32-bit. Kinda sucks that you have to go this route, but it may be another choice. If you need 32-bit disk version, I can help. Your 64-bit key will work with it.

 

Get Acronis Disk Director - that seems to be able to do anything with drives.

 

Not if it is a disk firmware issue, which seems to be the case here. Disk size is not reported correctly. Acronis will NOT help with this.

 

I don't think the firmware has anything to do with it. More like his partiton table is corrupt or the cloning tool just raw wrote on the drive. I did that once to create a boot disk from a floppy img and the windows disk management too could only see the flash drive as having 1.44mb. I had to use diskpart and clean to be able to use the rest of the space....

To the OP: Do the cloning with Acronis director. It's what I used to migrate from a 120gb drive from a 200gb one. It used all the space available and windows correctly repported all the extra space available after the process. Or you can get an ubuntu live cd and use the partition editor to try to see if the unallocatedspace even exist and then extend the partition.

 

I called Seagate and the tech told me it might be related to Dell's bios, since they had a few calls from people with similar problems who all had Dells. I don't know... when I first tried it in Acronis everything was fine, but I couldn't get to the cloning step since it was the free version. In Seagate's DiskWizard my drive already showed up as only 91 GB large before the cloning process. I just ended up returning the drive and should be getting the replacement soon.

Ayle: is there a free version of Acronis Director? I didn't want to shell out $50 to do something I'm only gonna do once in a long time, which is why I tried to get the free version of True Image to run, which sadly, didn't allow me to clone.