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Trouble with cloning 4TB Drive

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Using Acronis True Image to clone an internal laptop hard drive (500GB SATA HDD) on to a larger Seagate Barracuda 4TB SATA HDD. The problem is, the new drive is only recognized as 1.69TB. I've updated every driver I can find, in particular the Intel Storage drivers and all the rest of the Lenovo system drivers.

Nothing I do seems to find a way to get me use of the full hard drive (yes, I know it will be a little less than 4TB, but it's nowhere close).

What am I missing? Any tips/tricks to offer on how to remedy this? Thanks!

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Gene, welcome to these public User Forums.

How does your laptop boot from the BIOS into Windows?  Is this a Legacy / MBR boot system, or is it UEFI / GPT?  Run the command msinfo32 in Windows and look for BIOS mode in the right panel to check.

If it is Legacy, then you are hitting limitations for MBR drives which is 2TB.

What are you intending to do with the cloned 4TB drive after the clone is complete?  If you are intending to want to install it inside the laptop and use it to boot into Windows, then it needs to be installed inside when doing the clone, with the original 500GB laptop drive connected externally via a USB adapter.

Please see KB 56634: Acronis True Image: how to clone a disk - and review the step by step guide given there.

Note: the first section of the above KB document directs laptop users to KB 2931: How to clone a laptop hard drive - and has the following paragraph:

It is recommended to put the new drive in the laptop first, and connect the old drive via USB. Otherwise you will may not be able to boot from the new cloned drive, as Acronis True Image will apply a bootability fix to the new disk and adjust the boot settings of the target drive to boot from USB. If the new disk is inside the laptop, the boot settings will be automatically adjusted to boot from internal disk. As such, hard disk bays cannot be used for target disks. For example, if you have a target hard disk (i.e. the new disk to which you clone, and from which you intend to boot the machine) in a bay, and not physically inside the laptop, the target hard disk will be unbootable after the cloning.

It is always highly recommended to make a full disk backup of the source drive BEFORE embarking on any clone operation, this is your safety net against errors or issues arising.

Thanks. I'll check the BIOS settings. This is meant as the secondary drive in the laptop. There's an SSD which serves as the boot drive and Windows runs from there (already upgraded that to a larger size!). This is a physically HDD, which serves as the D (data) drive. So I was just hooking it up externally to clone it, with the plan of swapping it out after the successful clone.

If the BIOS isn't the issue, i'll come back for more help. Thanks!

Gene, see webpage: Understanding the 2 TB Limit in Windows Storage for more details of the limitations of MBR systems.

Cloning will always follow the partition scheme of the host computer where it is run with ATI, but you should be able to set the partition of the new drive to GPT then use a Copy utility to move your data across from another drive.  Alternatively, you could create a Files & Folders backup of your data, then recover that to the new 4TB GPT drive.  Unless your BIOS is ancient it should be able to correctly recognise GPT drives on a MBR system.

Gene, have you actually done the clone?  If so please download a copy of the free MiniTool Partition Wizard software and check that the 4TB drive shows as being GPT.  If it does, then you will probably see around 2TB of unallocated space following the cloned partition on the drive.

Use MPW to resize the partition to use all the drive space.

The drive type is set to GPT. BIOS is UEFI. Connected externally via a USB cradle. Still can only see 1.69TB. It's a 3 year old Lenovo laptop with all of the drivers and BIOS up to date. OK, so I'm probably missing something easy and obvious, belying my 30 years of computer experience. Can someone explain it to me like I'm in kindergarten and help a guy out here? Trying to upgrade my kid's computer since he's out of space on his data drive :)

Thanks!

I downloaded the Partition Wizard software. Here's what I see when I run it. The drive in question is "Disk 3", listed as GPT with 1.64TB.

Gene, it is entirely possible that this issue is being caused by the USB cradle you are using which can impose limitations such as this.

I would try a different USB adapter such as this one from Amazon that I use myself.

StarTech.com USB 3.1 to 2.5" SATA Hard Drive Adapter - USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps with UASP External HDD/SSD Storage Converter (USB312SAT3CB)

Note: the above is only for 2.5" laptop drives but the Amazon page shows alternative adapters if you have a 3.5" PC HDD drive.

I could try that, or possibly just yank the drive out and mount the current one externally, since it's a smaller drive. Then with the 4TB internally, maybe it would recognize the size. I think I"ll try that first.  Thanks