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Hard drive reduced in size after clone atempt/Migrate Easy

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Hope someone can help! i'm not entirely tech saavy so i will try to explain as best i can.

I am trying to upgrade my old harddrive with a new 250GB drive. I am using Migrate Easy to clone the old drive to the new drive. I used an external enclosure to do the cloning, went through all the steps, created a bootable drive, and cloned the old drive and it appeared to work. When i tried to install the new drive I got the blue screen error saying I might have installed a new drive and to remove the new drive to fix the error. (something to that effect) It would not boot from the new drive.

So i reinstalled the old drive and put the new drive into the enclosure to see if i could tell if the cloning worked. It assigned F: to the drive and then told me the drive capacity was only 73GB. (when it should be 250GB) I thought maybe I could fix this by reformating and cloning again. I was able to reformat but when I tried to clone again with Migrate Easy, it is not recognizing the 2nd drive and won't let me clone. It still reading as a 73GB drive and not 250GB capacity.

How do I get the new drive back to its former state of 250 MB and attempt the clone again? Also, once cloned, any ideas what went wrong and why it would not boot up my system? What step did I miss or do wrong?

Thanks for any help!....
Soroka

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I haven't used the standalone Migrate Easy, but, are you able to reformat your new drive? If you are this ought to bring it back to it's full capacity. Make sure you delete the existing partition before reformatting it.

Are you doing this from within Windows or from the CD?

If from the CD try putting the original drive in the external enclosure and the new drive in the PC - make sure both drives have meaningful names as Linux won't assign the same drive letters as Windows, giving drives/partitions names will always show up correctly.

Clone the external to the internal - if Migrate Easy has a manual option choose this so that you can select the partition to be extended over the whole drive (if that is what you want).

Make sure you only have the new drive attached when you go to boot for the first time.

You haven't mentioned which OS you are using, it is possible that Windows will have a problem finding it's boot files or that it sulks due to the disk ID being different to the one that is recorded in registry. If that is the case, the version of Windows will need ot be known before you can go any further.

Hi Colin,
Thanks for your help. I am using Windows XP, with the intention of upgrading to 7 if i can get this drive to work out. I can't reformat using Migrate Easy because it's not even recognizing the drive when use the external enclosure/USB.

The utility windows has only lets me reformat as is with the 73GB partition. (won't let me delete partitions like Migrate Easy does)

I'm trying to find another utility that will let me do this. Anything at Acronis that would do this?

Soroka

Soroka,

Disk Management in XP should allow you to delete the partition and reformat it.

If you are happy to use windows command line commands, you could also do this via the cmd console using diskpart utility that is part of XP.

I used Disk Management to delete the partition and what it is showing after that is a drive with 73GB unallocated space... Partition is gone, but still showing the same amount of capacity. =\  Migrate Easy is still not recognising the drive. And actually, now it is not showing up under my computer either. (Although it shows up in Computer Management and "Safely remove hardware"

Can you post a screen shot of what you see in Windows Disk Management and if possible what Migrate Easy is showing?

not sure if this worked or not? I tried embedding the screen shot into the text field and it wasn't showing up.

I tried to duplicate the error message from Migrate Easy, and now it IS recognising the drive as being there! yet still says its only 73 GBs as Disk Management is saying. I thought to try reformating but when i go through all the steps, 73GB is always there, so i didn't reformat yet.

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Would you check in your BIOS and see what this 73GB disk is reported as and also check to see if it is LBA enabled in the BIOS.

What brand is this hard drive?

It might be that somehow, the drive itself has decided it is smaller than it actually is.

IF the BIOS reports the correct size and it is set to LBA, then I'm not sure what to do next, I'll have to think.

If it isn't set to LBA in the BIOS, then make it an LBA drive, reboot and see what happens.

If the drive has decided it is smaller than it actually is, then the drive manaufacturer may well have a free utility that will reset it back.

Thanks Colin and Grover....
I just read Grovers post. It seems I do have a similar situation to the one posted... I just tried to reformat using "Add new disk" in Migrate easy and this didn't work either.

I have a Toshiba drive. I went to their website but can't find a utility for it. All I could find was one for Fujitsu branded drives, and I don't believe the one i have (MK2552GSX) is fujitsu. Any idea where one could be found?

Are you able to see what is written on the drive itself or does it say Toshiba?

The own brand drives are often from Fujitsu or Hitachi.

Windows System Report might give you the name of the drive, you'll find it off of Start\Accessories\SystemTools .

It may even give you the manufacturers name in Windows Device Manager.

Have you looked at the disk recovery links that Grover has posted in his thread?

Scott,
Refer back to my post #3. The two programs first mentioned in the post should work--neither are brand specific that I am aware of. There are some others but those two are the easiest to use.

thanks...
The label on the drive just says "Toshiba".
Windows Device Manager is just calling it "Generic External USB Device.
I downloaded the HDD Capacity Restore Tool and tried to run this. It only recognised the internal drive and not the external one. I have not tried the other links because i thought they were brand specific...?