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Restoring to a New Drive -

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I am trying to upgrade the drive in my Dell laptop.  The old drive was 128GB; the new drive is 500GB.

I did a full backup onto a USB drive.  When I try to restore to the new drive everything is fine but a large portion of the drive isn't allocated and thus I don't have access to it unless a create a separate partition.  I would like 1 large partition.

My work was as follows.  I booted to the recovery USB drive.  I added the new drive in True Image and formatted it into 1 partition.  I new did a full restore to the drive.  I checked all the boxes as to what I should restore which included the MBR, the 107GB OS/C and a couple other small parts.

What am I doing wrong?

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For Windows OS. Right click on computer or my computer to access "computer management." Then go to Disk management like in the attached screen capture. There are a number of ways to get there. Then right click on the disk in question, the C drive, which is most likely Disk 0, and then select the option to add the unallocated space to the drive. That should do it. Good luck.

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David, welcome to these user forums.

When recovering to a new larger drive you would need to allow Acronis to automatically resize the restored partition to fit with the new drive.

I would guess the key question to ask is whether the restored drive is working OK in your laptop, i.e. that you have replaced the old 128GB drive and installed the 500GB drive and it boots correctly into Windows?

If so, then rather than suggesting that you start over with another restore, I would recommend downloading one of the various free Partition Manager programs, i.e. MiniTool Partition Wizard, Easeus PM, AOMEI PM etc and using this to resize your main OS C: partition.

Note: If you are running one of the later versions of Windows, then you may have a small Recovery partition immediately after the OS one.  You will need to move that Recovery partition to the end of the drive, then increase / expand the OS partition into the free space left on the drive.

Thanks for your response.

I thought I was allowing Acronis to resize the partition.

Should I be choosing MBR or GPT?  I have been choosing MBR.  Could that be the problem.

The restored drive is working fine.  The only issue is the unallocated portion.

 

David, choosing MBR is probably correct for your system if all is working OK after the restore.

GPT is only really needed if you are upgrading for a significantly larger drive where you are going beyond the capacity that MBR can recognise.

If you look in Windows Disk Management (as Jacob suggested) then this will show you if the unallocated partition space is adjacent to your Windows OS partition or not.

If it is, then you can simply use the Disk Management option to Expand the OS partition into that unallocated space.

If not, then you will need to use a Partition Manager program to move the Recovery partition as I said in my previous post.

Steve,

I am all set.  I did as you said and used one of the free partition programs to extend the partition.  For some reason I couldn't do this in disk management.  The extend volume selection was grayed out.

You guys have been very helpful. 

David, good to hear that all is well, glad to have been able to help.