Chip T

Hey Guys,
I appreciate any help you can offer me with this little issue I am having.
I have a Dell Dimension 3000 and it has a 160 GB hard drive that I am running out of space on.

I bought a new WD 500 GB hard drive and decided I wanted to clone my old hard drive to the new one. I used O&O Disk Image to do this operation. The cloning process went smooth and the new hard drive booted properly. The problem I have now is that the new hard drive was partitioned to exactly match the old one, so here is what it looks like:

An FAT partition with Dell Recover on it
A NTFS partition with the main date on it.
An FAT32 partition with some other Dell recovery information on it.
316 GB of unallocated Disk Space

Now the problem is that the main NTFS partition is exactly the same size as the old one and the unallocated space is sitting out there. I tried to use O&O and Partition Magic 8.0 to merge the unallocated space into the C: drive but Partition Magic tells me it cannot be merged. The only thing that I can do is format that section and give it a new name but I still cannot merge it with the C: drive.

Help!!
how can I fix this problem by either doing the process over with a different software that will avoid this problem or fix the problem as is?

Thanks for all the help,
Chip T

grimx133

If the space isn't a partition, you should be able to expand the size of the c: to use it. See what it shows as in disk management.

raptor_pa

Actually it did exactly what it should have in creating a clone - exact duplicate - of the original drive. In XP you cannot expand the boot volume, in this case the C drive. Not sure about Vista. What you could do is create the new partition, then mount it as a diectory on the c drive, this would give you access to the capacity as a directory on the C drive. Or just use it as a second partitio and install apps to the new partition and save documents to the new partition. You might be able to expand it with gparted on a Linux boot cd, but not 100% sure how it will work. If it fails, you could always reclone again if you still have the original drive intact.

josiahb

I've had a fair amount of success using gparted on a bootable USB key to resize NTFS boot partitions, as raptor says the worst that could happen is you have to redo the clone from the original drive if it scrambles things.

Chip T

Thanks guys, I am going to try Gparted and try to add the unallocated space to the C: drive first. Is there any other software or procedure I could use that could perform a clone or something similar to that that would help me avoid the problem?

also, I think I read somewhere that what I could do is just clone the C:drive without the two other hidden partitions that existed originally, all this would do is remove my ability to use the Dell recovery feature that I am not really interested in using anyway. What do you think of that?

Thanks again
Chip T

grimx133

Try partition magic, since you have it. Not to merge, but to incorporate the unallocated space into the drive. xp won't do it in disc management, but a third party partitioning utility will.
Give this a try. 250gb HD not showing full real capacity under Properties

Chip T

I fixed it !!
I used the Gparted live CD and it worked perfect. I was able to move the partition down and move the unallocated space up and merge it into the C drive. This now gave me a C: with all the unallocated space that I had before and my operating system is working just fine.
Thanks for all the help, you guys are great

sheng

The following free tool may help you solve such kind of problem:

Clone and resize the disk freeware: http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

http://partedmagic.com/


http://partitionlogic.org.uk/


http://www.cutepm.com/


http://www.ranish.com/part/

Copy freeware: http://www.easeus.com/disk-copy/