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Return New Hard Drive to Factory Settings after Losing Capacity Following Cloning of Old Drive?

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A couple days ago I cloned my old 80gb Hitachi hard drive onto a 320gb WD Scorpio Black using True Image.

Once I swapped out the drives and booted the system up, I found that my drive now reads as an 80gb drive just like my old one. Apparently, the Dell and Hitachi laptop combination has a quirky way of partitioning the hard drive, making cloning much more complicated than usual. I checked Disk Manager and there isn't any unallocated space. 240gb is just gone.

In any case, I have found through the Knowledge Base that there are a couple fairly complicated ways to get the missing capacity to reappear, but as a total novice at configuring hardware, I think it's going to take a significant effort and time commitment to puzzle out the solution. Right now I'm just lost from the very first steps and I don't know that I have the time to slog through all this stuff.

Instead I was hoping there might be a way to completely reset the drive to its minty fresh "factory" condition and try to clone my old drive again, this time with the knowledge that I need to perform a few tweaks along the way that True Image didn't make me aware of the first time out.

So, is it possible to completely wipe the drive so whatever weird partitioning was done during the cloning process can be undone? If so, what's the best way?

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Using a some form of disk management software to delete the partition, should bring the drive back to reporting 320GB.

What does Windows Disk Management report? Right click My Computer (Vista/W7) choose Managment then Disk Management

Hi Jeffrey

Just a few things in addition to what Colin asked:

Which version of TI are you using?
I wouldn't worry about the drive being Hitachi, its more about what the DELL has on it!

When you cloned the drive did it ask about the partitions - Dell have a recovery partition which can cause problems and I'm not sure in your situation how to handle this properly with success but It would help to know what options you took or were offered when cloning.

Check this link. This should do the job. Let us know if successful or unsuccessful.

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/9303#comment-25052