True Image - trying to install a larger hard drive and Media Direct problems
Hello -- I read all the postings and solutions about the problems Dell's Media Direct causes with installing a new, larger hard drive in their laptops, and thought I understood how to avoid the problems. I was very wrong. Here's the details from this weekend, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
The laptop is a Dell e1705, originally a 100 GB Hitachi Travelstar installing a new 500 GB Hitachi Travelstar. The original hard drive had three partitions: 47 MB used/40 MB free (FAT 16, Healthy EISA); 87.96 GB used/584 free (NFTS, Healthy System); 3.74 GB used/528 MB free (FAT 32, Healthy unknown). So following Grover's posted directions about restoring partitions and Brian K's caution about Dell lap tops, when I restored my True Image backup from an external USB drive I did *not* check the box "Restore MBR and Track 0". However I did restore all three actual partitions... So my new 500 GB hard drive shows up as a 100 GB, with four partitions. My understanding is that the third 3.74 GB partition is where the LBA-3 is actually stored, and I should not have restored this one. Is this correct?
Following the older forum threads (from 2005) I tried to use Roadkil's Sector Editor to find and clear LBA-3, but my third sector did not show the [XLDR] string suggested as an indicator of the target sector. And when I did a search of the entire file this string [XLDR] was not in the file. So I couldn't figure out how to zero LBA-3. Next, I used True Image to erase the entire new 500 GB hard drive, hoping to wipe out LBA-3 that way, and then performed a new restore and only restored the first two partitions (47 MB, 87.96 GB). This didn't work - the 500 GB only shows as a 100 GB, and has four partitions: 47 MB FAT, 373.75 GB (unallocated), 87.96 GB (NFTS System), 4.01 GB (unallocated). The True Image 2010 is build 5,005.
thanks for any advice or help in resolving this problem --
Chris
Sorry - Windows XP, Service Pack 3. And there should be a disk map below if I've done it right. I have to run to a meeting, but I'll try Partition Wizard this afternoon. Thanks -
In the Disk Management screenshot, the drive is showing correctly (as 500GB). There are only two partitions. The rest is unallocated (not used by any partition).
I think I would just delete the Windows partition and just restore it so it starts after the FAT partition. You should be able to resize it as desired. If you decide to resize the existing Windows partition instead, make sure to do a good defrag on it to get the files moved to the fast area of the drive (they're in a slow area right now).
Thanks for the suggestions - everything worked, eventually. But there were a couple wrinkles. I first tried MudCrab's suggestion to delete the Windows partition, and restore it so it starts after the FAT partition. I deleted the latter three partitions, and only restored the Windows partition. This got rid of the unallocated fourth partition, but I somehow still had the huge (378 GB) middle unallocated partition. Next, I moved onto thomasjk's suggestion to resize the partition. I ran into several problems - Partition Wizard needed to defragment the partition before it could resize it, and there was not enough space to defrag it, so I deleted a bunch of files to get the space. Even after defragmenting the partition, I couldn't do everything in one set of commands. I had to reclaim the unallocated in two separate steps. First I had to move the Windows partition to right after the FAT one, restart, then resize the Windows partition to get all the remaining unallocated space. Then copy back across all the deleted files from an external drive. There was alot of trial & error in there - but thanks to all the previous posters and thomasjk & MudCrab I was able to get my new hard drive with 466 GB accessible and working! A huge relief. Thanks for your quick and helpful suggestions --
chris