Weird and annoying HDD problems

[Tomer S]

Alright so, going on a bit of a rant about what's going on and why I need help.

My HDD started acting funny a few days ago with it having some errors and things bugging out so I went ahead and bought a new HDD today to clone my data to before the old one dies. I bought the new HDD, plugged it in and booted up normally with my old one. I used a cloning tool my friend recommended to clone all of my stuff to the new one. I turned off my PC, I unplugged my old HDD and tried booting up from the new drive. Everything seemed normal but then I noticed it displayed that the drive only has 500GBs of storage but it's suppose to have 1TB, the old one had 500GBs. So I I tried unplugging the new one and replugging it back in and then it said BOOTMRG missing. I tried several times to boot from the new one even from the BIOS but nothing worked. So I then plugged in my old HDD and booted up the PC, it still shows the new drive but with 500GBs and everything I have stored on it because of the clone, I tried to maybe clone again to the new drive but the program said I am booted from the new drive currently. So I have no freaking clue what to do at this point and I'm scared my old drive will die before I can clone everything properly and I'll lose some very important data. You guys are my last resort.

If it helps my old HDD is TOSHIBA 500GBs and the new is WD 1TB with the same attributes from what I understand, I'm not a tech wizard and I'm just trying to play video games.

 

[bjornl]

Smart choice = re-install. Least problems. Recommended to be done from time to time regardless.
I can't make heads nor tails out of your above post. So let me paraphrase what I think you said.
OLD HD was making you nervous.
Bought new HD
Used some un-named clone tool to avoid re-installing.
Clone tool created a 500gb parition because the source drive was 500gb.
You freaked out because you bought a 1tb drive and only found 500gb
You tried to boot from some disk (the old one I think) and was not able.
So you plugged both in and booted from the new one and then tried to clone the now bad (old, non-booting) disk over the new disk but were unable because the new disk was your boot drive.

Cloning is not the same as a backup. If you have data you value you must back it up or prepared to do without it.
There are other clone tools which will let you go from un-equal sized paritions. Dozens of them infact.
You could instead just use parition magic to expand your "new disk" from 500gb to ~1tb
Or you could use disk manager (in windows) to create a 2nd parition from the remaining space on your "new disk". In effect giving you a 2nd 500gb HD (it will still be on the same HD and so is not a good place for backups).

You'll be happier if you take the longer route and just do it right. Re-install. It is simpler to get this right than continue to flay about trying to make sense of programs you don't know and seem to have little interest in mastering beyond this one time.

 

[Tomer S]

Smart choice = re-install. Least problems. Recommended to be done from time to time regardless.
I can't make heads nor tails out of your above post. So let me paraphrase what I think you said.
OLD HD was making you nervous.
Bought new HD
Used some un-named clone tool to avoid re-installing.
Clone tool created a 500gb parition because the source drive was 500gb.
You freaked out because you bought a 1tb drive and only found 500gb
You tried to boot from some disk (the old one I think) and was not able.
So you plugged both in and booted from the new one and then tried to clone the now bad (old, non-booting) disk over the new disk but were unable because the new disk was your boot drive.

Cloning is not the same as a backup. If you have data you value you must back it up or prepared to do without it.
There are other clone tools which will let you go from un-equal sized paritions. Dozens of them infact.
You could instead just use parition magic to expand your "new disk" from 500gb to ~1tb
Or you could use disk manager (in windows) to create a 2nd parition from the remaining space on your "new disk". In effect giving you a 2nd 500gb HD (it will still be on the same HD and so is not a good place for backups).

You'll be happier if you take the longer route and just do it right. Re-install. It is simpler to get this right than continue to flay about trying to make sense of programs you don't know and seem to have little interest in mastering beyond this one time.

Sorry if my message is a little all over the place let me try to explain the situation again -

Old HD was acting weird, making noises, showing signs of failing
Bought new HD
Decide to try and clone disk since I have a lot of important stuff on my PC that I'd like to keep
Plugged it in, it didn't show up on the devices catagory but shruged it off as a glitch
Used tool "Reflect" tool to clone old HD to new one
Boot from new HD, see it only has 500 gigs
Unplug and plug back new HD, says BOOTMRG is missing
Freak out a little bit
Plug in old and new HD, boot from the old one
See that the new one is there and labled as E: but still has 500 gigs
Try to mess around with parition to fix it, didn't work
New HD still doesn't boot by itself and old one is still glitchy and the only bootable one
Try to clone again to see if that fixes it but program won't let me do so because it says I'm booted from the new HD even though that one didn't boot up at all by itself
Go to Tom's Hardware looking for help.

That's the situation, I really do want to avoid doing a re-install, I did one only around 8 months ago and since then I've built up a bulk of important data.

 

[popatim]

At this point you have two choices.
1: reclone and this time maximize that partition size: http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/Cloning+a+disk
2: Use a partition to to expand the existing partition using any of the freely available partition tools from Easus, Paragon, Mini-tool, or any other that you might be familiar with.