WD Black 5TB unallocated space

[CxDeMoN5614]

I recently purchased a WD 5TB Black to replace the 1TB Blue I'd been using for a little over a year. I used an external Hard Drive Bay to connect it to my PC via USB and then used the free WD version of Acronis to clone my 1TB onto my 5TB.

Then I swapped the 2 drives out so the 5TB is in my rig. But I noticed that only about 1TB of the new WD Black is available and the rest is completely partitioned off. I tried messing around with the Partition settings in Windows (and some other partition programs) but didn't really have any luck getting my other 4TB of space.

From browsing threads, I've seen people fix similar mistakes by changing their MotherBoard's settings and whatnot... My Motherboard supports Dual UEFI bios so I think I could get this all sorted out, but I'm unsure exactly of what to do. I was hoping someone here would have an idea or be able to confirm that I could somehow open up the other 4TB I'm blocked off from.

For what it matters, my Motherboard is a Gigabyte 970A-DS3P. Thanks to anybody who reads this!

 

[thejackal85]

So here's the thing..

Acronis, Norton 360, etc., they rely on a process called imaging. Which basically makes an "as is" copy of your entire system you can keep for cases like these. So, because your last drive was 1TB and your new partition on the 5TB is only showing 1TB, this tells me you did a sector by sector copy. This is a little more thorough in the fact that it partitions off the remainder of what you don't need.

To usually fix this, open Device Manager>Disk Management. When this window opens, you might get a pop up asking what you want to do with the other partition; from there you can mark it as active and format it for use. If not, rescan the list and it will then pop up. The idea here is you need to make that inactive partition an active volume, which is what Disk Management does.

 

[ArtPog]

There are two potential issues involved here...
1. The first is the disk-cloning program you're using. It's possible that the free version of the Acronis True Image program furnished by one or more HDD manufacturers does not possess the capability of creating a partition on the destination drive equal to the disk-space capacity of the disk to contain the cloned contents of the source drive; rather, the program will create a partition equal to the partition size of the source drive. That would account for your 5 TB HDD containing only a 1 TB partition containing the cloned contents since your source drive was a 1 TB HDD.

Since I haven't worked with that Acronis program I don't know for sure whether that's the case here. But if it is, there should be no problem for you simply using Disk Management to extend the 1 TB partition since presumably all the disk-space following that partition is unallocated. Isn't that so? If you don't know the precise way to accomplish this search Google for instructions on using Disk Management to extend partition.

Of course you could use another disk-cloning program as well. I believe the Macrium Reflect program has the capability you're looking for.

2. However, there's another potential issue here. And that involves the MBR - GPT disk partitioning schemes.
I'm assuming your 1 TB HDD was (is) MBR-partitioned. If that is so, the resultant destination drive clone will similarly be MBR-partitioned even if had been previously partitioned GPT. So this would result in the destination drive having maximum size of about 2 TB; the remaining disk-space on the disk would not be able to be utilized by the OS. Now you could get around this by using a third-party commercial disk management program to convert the 5 TB disk back to GPT following the d-c operation. I don't believe any of the free versions of these programs possess this capability and I'm unaware of any OS internal process to accomplish this.

Of course if your 1 TB HDD was (is) GPT-partitioned, all this is moot.