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Migrate Easy 7 - upgraded 30Gb to a 250GB HD - Now Drive is full

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I recently used Migrate Easy 7 to upgrade my Laptop's 30GB Hard Drive to a 250GB Western Digital hard Drive. I am running Windows XP and had 2 partiions. Both Partitions were being resized during the migration. My O/S was in a partition going from 8GB to 25Gb (d dvie) and all my programs and other data was going from about 22GB to around 220B (c drive). Everything went pretty smoothly, I thought.

I swapped the HD's to install the larger one. The computer booted up no problem. After a short while I started getting drive full errors. I checked the drive in the windows utility and the c drvie is showing completely full with 0 free space. After Checking everywhere to see if I could locate what was using that much space (no luck) I redid the migration. After a short time same scenario.

I have been on with support 3 times and they have taken control of my laptop remotely. No luck. I have run chkdsk with no luck. I was finally told to redo the Migration a 3rd time using the manual process, but my origninal HD won't boot now so I am stuck. The D drive seems to have empty space on it, but the c drive as soon as I delete space it gets used in no time. My applications are failling since I have no space. I can't even install diagnostic tools to check because I have no space. I saw in a forum to use Treesize to locate the used space, but I could not get the download to work. I also tried to use partition magic to Combine the partitions, but it created a 3rd unallocated partion taking the space out of the d drive before it failed (see attached screen shot) What do i do?

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I'm not sure what has gone wrong, but the 12.81GB unallocated partition is the current problem.

The only way I can see Migrate Easy causing your new C:\ partition to look as though it is full is if the partition tables in the MBR have become corrupted.

From within Windows make sure you have hidden files and folders as well as system files enabled for viewing.

Check the size of your pagefile.sys and also check to see if your temp folder - c:\my documents and settings\your_user_name\local setting\temp doesn't have any large file in it. Also search for and delete any *.dmp files.

Using Windows Disk Management, you should be able to 'expand' your C:\ partition into the unallocated area of the disk.

I've just seen a possible cause, but could you confirm - Windows Disk Management appears to be contradicting itself, the top panel shows the C:\ partition as 206GB in size and has free space of 206.GB free, and yet Disk Properties shows it as full.

Was the old disk compressed? What happens if you untick the compress option?

With the old disk, did you select the wipe old disk function or are the old contents still there but it just won't boot?

There seem to be a number of posts here concerning problems with Western Digital drives, but in your case I wouldn't ahve thought the drive size would be a problem.

David,

Just out of interest, what is the drive model of the 250GB drive and what brand laptop do you use?

I ask as you might have noticed there is one other person here who is having a problem with a WD 250GB drive in that the ME CD won't recognise his drive.

Colin,

The unallocated partition is definitely not the problem. I accidently created that when I tried to merge the 2 partitions using Partition Magic. Because I do not have any space left on the c drive partion, Partition magic could not complete. The unallocated partition came out of the d drive (system partition).

The laptop is an older IBM T42. The WD drive is a PATA Scorpio Blue.

I think the old disk was compressed. I had support connect to my Computer and they view all files looking to see where the space was being used, but could not find it. I asked them if it could be a corrupt MBR and they said absolutely not since I was able to boot up.

I did not wipe the old HD. I am not sure why but it just won't boot now (all the contents should still be there).