Help Needed. Bought a 3TB Hard Drive. Cloned my old 1.5tb to it and it created a 2tb partition and 746gb are unalocated

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mikemefistous

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I have windows 10, which is why it suprises me on how come this problem persists. My MOBO z170x gaming 3

I got a Toshiba 3tb 7200rpm 64mb cache hard drive yesterday. (Toshiba DT01ACA300)

I successfully backed up my baracuda 7200rpm 32mb cache 1.5tb, by cloning it into my new hard drive.

I used paragon hard disk manager 15 premium to do the cloning.

Specifically, this is how the manager handled it.

When i had my new hard drive installed, it allowed me to make a 2.8tb partition on the new hard drive.

However i wanted to back up my old one and replace it with it, so i wanted to clone the previous one to this new one.

I selected the cloning process, however it wouldn't let me create a bigger partition other than 2tb.

So, to sum things up. Trying to create a new partition from scratch, it allowed me to create a 2.8tb partition, which is the norm for a 3tb hard drive.

However when i chose to clone, it would allow me to clone my old hard drive, by making a 2tb partition on my 3tb and leaving 764.5gb unalocated.


So my thought process was, okay i'll clone my previous hard drive, however after i am done cloning, i will simply select to allocate the other 764.5gb as a different hard drive by giving it a different letter etc.

The problem is, Windows Disk Manager & paragon manager won't allow me to allocate the 764.5gb. It remains as unalocated free space and it won't let me use it. When i select that unalocated space with the Windows Disk Manager by right clicking it, it only allows me to select Properties and Help. IT won't allow me to allocate it.

Anyone knows how to fix that and allocate that 764gb?
 
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Most third-party partition management programs will have the capability of converting an MBR-partitioned disk to the GPT-partitioning scheme so that the entire disk-space of a drive > 2 TB will be detected by the OS and become usable for storing data.

As I assume you have learned Disk Management has the capability of converting a disk from MBR to GPT, but ONLY if the drive is empty of data. So you will need to use one of those third-party programs to accomplish this.

AOMEI, MiniTool, Easeus (there are others) possess this capability. I believe in most cases their freely-available or trial versions have this capability, however some programs may require a user to purchase their commercial version.

One word of caution...before using...
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mikemefistous

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Can you please elaborate on what GPT formatting is or what supporting UEFI is ?

I've heared of UEFI and i've had to mess with it on my laptop to be able to boot windows from a flash drive, but i never understood what it was.

What is my solution going to be?

As i said, when i freshly installed my new hard drive and it was all unalocated, the programm allowed me to create a 2.8tb partition.

However the cloning process took me 9 hours, not only that, but my 1.5tb hard drive has been failing for a while now, so i don't know if it will survive another cloning, it's head was doing a bunch of clicking noises when i cloned it yesterday.

not only that, but i wanted my new 3tb hard drive to maintain the shortcuts/registry installed programms etc. which is why i chose to clone it, instead of making a 2.8tb partition then copying the files from my old to the new one.
 
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ArtPog

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Most third-party partition management programs will have the capability of converting an MBR-partitioned disk to the GPT-partitioning scheme so that the entire disk-space of a drive > 2 TB will be detected by the OS and become usable for storing data.

As I assume you have learned Disk Management has the capability of converting a disk from MBR to GPT, but ONLY if the drive is empty of data. So you will need to use one of those third-party programs to accomplish this.

AOMEI, MiniTool, Easeus (there are others) possess this capability. I believe in most cases their freely-available or trial versions have this capability, however some programs may require a user to purchase their commercial version.

One word of caution...before using any of these programs it's wise to clone the contents of the drive being converted to another drive in case the conversion process goes awry and results in a corrupted data disk. THIS DOES HAPPEN FROM TIME TO TIME SO BE AWARE OF IT.

Also, if an OS has been installed on the disk to be converted the partition management program will balk at carrying out the conversion process.
 
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Paperdoc

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You don't say this explicitly, but I suspect we are talking about replacing your BOOT drive with a new large unit. If this really is the drive you BOOT from, there are THREE requirements you MUST have to use any HDD over 2 TB.

1. You MUST Partition the drive using the newer GPT style of Partitioning, not the older MBR style. BUT that also means that you must be able to meet the next two conditions. If you can't that may be why the Paragon cloning tool refused to Partition in that manner.
2. To be able to BOOT from a HDD set up with GPT Partitioning, you MUST have UEFI support in your machine's BIOS. "UEFI support" is what the BIOS uses to read that Partition Table on the GPT-Partitioned unit so it can find the OS and load it. Without UEFI Support in BIOS, it cannot read such a disk, so it can't boot from it. If your machine lacks UEFI Support, you cannot boot from a drive over 2TB, so there would be no sense in setting it up that way.
3. To use any drive over 2 TB under Windows, you need the correct device driver for that. 32-bit versions of Windows do NOT include that driver, so they cannot deal with any drive over 2 TB. You MUST use a 64-bit version of Windows to use larger HDD's, whether or not you are booting from it.

It is possible that your system failed to meet at least one of these requirements. In that case, maybe the Paragon cloning tool was smart enough to recognize that and limited you to what can work, rather than letting you create an impossible situation.
 
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mikemefistous

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It wasn't a boot drive. It was a drive where i kept my files.

Anyways, thanks everyone for trying to help me, but i didn't get the solution , so i reformated the new drive and now it's at 2.8tb as it should and i just copied the files with a normal copy paste and lost all my shortcuts etc.
 
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ArtPog

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OK. Glad that you were finally able to achieve your objective. But why didn't you use one of those partition management type programs I recommended? They usually perform the conversion job (MBR-to-GPT) effectively and quickly.

My cautionary note to first clone the contents of the disk to be converted was just that - a cautionary note. Like all other major changes in a system's configuration in "Computerland" s*!t happens as we all know. And there's always a possibility that one will wind up with a corrupted data disk as a result of an operation gone awry. And converting a disk from MBR-to-GPT (or vice versa) IS a major system configuration change. But by & large we've found these partition management programs seem to handle it quite well.
 
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mikemefistous

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I forgot to add that it was time sensitive.

I tried downloading one of the programms recommended but the trial version wouldn't let me apply anything. I wasn't even 100% sure of what i was doing.

Reason it was time sensitive, is because i had to return the device where i plugged my old hard drive in order to transfer it's files to the newly installed one.
 
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