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My new hard drive shrank from 500GB to 92GB

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I have a 500GB Hitatchi 2.5 inch hard drive that now reads 92 GB after I attempted a disk-to-disk clone using Acronis true image home. The mfr says the sectors/track should be 1980, and my Win XP OS shows 63 sectors per track. The 92GB is exactly the same capacity as the drive I was trying to clone. How do I get my 500GB back? (I don't care about the data)???

Here are the details of what I did, as best I can remember:
1) I create a boot disk for Acronis True Image Home.
2) I put my new 500GB drive into a USB enclosure (my destination drive), and my source drive into a HP laptop
3) I ran the process for "clone a hard disk" from the Acronis boot drive.
4) I can't remember which options I selected

The resulting clone didn't work as a boot disk, but worse yet, the total disk capacity of the new 500GB drive now shows as equal to the total disk capacity of the source drive = 92GB.

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First, open Windows Disk Management and look at the drive in the graphical view. Determine whether the space is truly lost or is the space being shown as unallocated.

If lost, click on my signature below and check out item 9-F.

Let us know from there.

It worked!!
I happen to have a Hitachi drive, and from your index, I found out about the "Hitatchi Feature Tool". I downloaded the ISO image of the boot disk, burned the ISO to a CD, and rebooted that application from the boot CD, and it had a menu item to restore my drive capacity, which worked instantly! Then I went back to Acronis, and did a conservative disk backup- disk-restore (not a disk-to-disk or sector-by-sector restore) using the Acronis boot disk for both steps, and a USB drive to hold the archive. It restored perfectly, including the funky Dell hidden partitions.

Grover, thank you for your fine community service - you saved my neck!

Dana Ludwig

Thanks Dana. It's always nice to know that something works as planned and it's great to hear that you did both a disk backup and a disk restore. A disk restore will usually have a good success ratio providing the user has created the proper backup in the beginning that included all their contents.