Lost HDD Space

[aldous92107]

I am tring to replace my failing 60gb hitachi laptop drive with a 320gb western digital hdd on my laptop. I downloaded the latest version of Aconis (western digital's hdd tool") everything seemed to go well> Acronis recognized the new blank drive and formatted it into ntfs then I proceeded to follow the automatic drive clone tool to clone my 60gb drive to the new 320gb drive. when I swapped out the drive and tried to boot I got just past bios and the bsod. now when I take the drive out it only reads as 54gb I lost 280 gb of storage. I tried this on two drives now and I have 2 320gb drives that now only read as 54gb. I have tried active and easeus to try to get the drives back to zero. I will never use Acronis agian I just want more storage for my laptop HELP!~

Thank You,

Brian

 

[mosox]

You can find the lost space in Control panel/administrative tools/computer management/disk management.

 

[aldous92107]

You can find the lost space in Control panel/administrative tools/computer management/disk management.

Thanks for the reply.

ya I tried that too and it only see it as a healthy 54gb drive not a 320 (280 in xp) I have been building computers for several years and this has never happened before... really has me stumped. Any ideas you may have will be appreciated

 

[Paperdoc]

You were caught by default settings.

In the Acronis I have used, when you clone from an old drive to a new one its default action is to make the clone copy the SAME SIZE as the original! For what you are doing, you need to manaully change the settings before making your clone.

Now, you already have two drives done this way. Start fresh with one of them and your old drive. Run Acronis and the very first step should be to find the new 320 GB unit and Delete any partitions it has. BE VERY CAREFUL that you know you are working on the NEW 320 GB unit here! You don't want to delete anything from your old drive!

Now, go to the part of Acronis that makes clone copies. Check the menu systems - in fact, reading the manual ahead of time will really help you do this work! - and find the place where you can specify the size of the DESTINATION drive's Partition. I expect you want to have it use ALL of the new drive to make the Partition. Set it that way and check that it is making a Primary Partition that is bootable, and will install the NTFS File System. Those last things are likely to be set as defaults already and you won't need to change them. Now go ahead and re-make your clone copy. When you are done you should have the new HDD with a Partition of about 295 GB and all your old stuff on there, ready to boot from.

You have a second HDD with a small Partition containing a clone. I expect you do not need that at all - you'd rather have a blank drive to use. So use Acronis again to delete the Partition that was created on that second drive. Then you can choose what to do. If you plan to install it somewhere and use it only for data storage, you can have Acronis create on it a new Primary Partition that is NOT bootable and uses up the full disk space, and Format it with the NTFS File System. Or, if you want to make another clone copy of some other drive to it, you can do that instead.