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Question about cloning on a larger drive

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Hello,

I was wondering, if I use a larger drive to clone a smaller one, will I lose the extra space?

E.g. I clone a 128 GB drive onto a 256 GB drive, will the second drive be seen as a 128 GB?

Thanks

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Joe, in principle when cloning from your 128GB drive to a 256GB drive, ATI should automatically resize the data being cloned to fit with the larger size available, though from various posts in the forums, there seems to be mixed results in reality, i.e. some have seen automatic resizing but others have reported the end result being cloned 'as is'.

Personally, I haven't had a problem with either result on the few occasions when I have tried this type of upgrade, as I then turn to a different tool to put things exactly as I want them to be.  I have used a variety of Partition Manager tools over the years to resize partitions, but one which seems to be a favourite with users here is the free MiniTool Partition Wizard which is very capable of this operation.

Hi Steve,

sorry for the late reply, I have been trying to login for three days without success.

 

So, if I understand your reply correctly, either I could end up with a larger partition in the first place or I'll have to use a third-party partition manager and hope for the best?

Joe, not exactly a case of hoping for the best.  Cloning should normally automatically adjust the partition sizes to fit a different size target drive (larger or smaller) but there have been instances where that doesn't always happen.  My comment was that such situations are not a major issue as there are good third-party tools like the MiniTool Partition Wizard that makes resizing partition (and moving if needed) an easy action to perform.

You could of course use Acronis Disk Director to do the same type of resizing/move action but not everyone has that application and to be honest here, DD is somewhat dated now compared to PW.