Hard Drive Cloning... Gone Strangely

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JESSE1408

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Apr 22, 2017
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Hi,

I set onto a task to clone a hard drive for someone. The source hard drive is about 300GB and the destination hard drive is 1TB.

When I "cloned" them, the cloning appears to have worked (as in all the files/folders look identical in Windows, haven't tried to boot from the destination drive yet) BUT the size of the 1TB hard drive shrunk to 300GB like the source hard drive is.

I attempted to format the drive but it still says 300GB.

Cloning is completely new to me but I offered to try it for the person as they didn't want to have to reformat given what we were going to do (switching hard drives between computers).

I told them I know "cloning" is a thing but I just haven't ever done it and they wanted me to do this as a learning experience - so this is my results so far.

I used "AOMEI Backupper Standard" as it's free (although if I can get the hang of this I may actually get Acronis).

Thanks in advance.
 
Solution
A
It appears the disk-cloning operation went just fine. We've worked with that AOMEI Backupper program and have generally found it a suitable disk-cloning program.

What has apparently resulted is that the d-c operation has created a partition EQUAL to the partition of the source drive. Many d-c programs do the same. Hopefully you will be able to use Disk Management to extend the created partition to encompass all (or whatever portion desired) of the "unallocated" disk-space following the 300 GB partition so that the full capacity of the 1 TB destination drive will contain the contents of the source drive. It's a quick & easy operation to do so.

A problem sometimes occurs if a Recovery Partition and/or a EFI System Partition immediately...
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A

ArtPog

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Sep 17, 2014
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It appears the disk-cloning operation went just fine. We've worked with that AOMEI Backupper program and have generally found it a suitable disk-cloning program.

What has apparently resulted is that the d-c operation has created a partition EQUAL to the partition of the source drive. Many d-c programs do the same. Hopefully you will be able to use Disk Management to extend the created partition to encompass all (or whatever portion desired) of the "unallocated" disk-space following the 300 GB partition so that the full capacity of the 1 TB destination drive will contain the contents of the source drive. It's a quick & easy operation to do so.

A problem sometimes occurs if a Recovery Partition and/or a EFI System Partition immediately follows the 300 GB created partition. If that has happened let us know.
 
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Solution
dextermat

dextermat

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Sep 21, 2007
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Hi,

When you clone a drive to a bigger one you usually have the option to resize partitions or use full drive.
Most likely, if you goto disk manager, you should be able to create a partition with the unused space (more or less 700 GB)

If you want to clone to whole disk, reclone and look the option.
 
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faalin

faalin

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Feb 22, 2012
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Like others have said when you clone a 300GB to 1TB it will only make the drive 300GB. You will need to go into disk manager and ether extend the 300GB to the full 1TB, easy as right clicking on the new 300GB and telling it to extend the drive to the full 1TB, or right clicking on the unallocated space and telling it to be another partition on the drive giving you a C: and D: drive. Note if the 1TB drive fails it will kill both the C: and D: drive since they are physically the same drive.
 
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ArtPog

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Sep 17, 2014
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faalin:
Just FYI...not all disk-cloning programs will create the same-size partition of the source drive on the destination drive. It depends upon the d-c program itself. For example, the d-c program we generally employ - Casper - will, as the default, utilize the ENTIRE disk-space of the destination drive to contain the contents of the source drive regardless of the source drive's partition size. And Casper also has user options to manipulate the size of the partition(s) on the destination drive, provided of course that the partition is sufficiently sized to contain the cloned contents.

Also, we have come across more than one d-c program the will ONLY size the created partition on the destination drive EQUAL to the volume of cloned contents (regardless of the source drive's partition that contained those contents).
 
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D

Doctor Rob

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Jul 21, 2008
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I use acronis and it auto sizes the new space (you can manually change it too) and have done it many times now going from a smaller drive to larger drive (or large drive to smaller) like a 1TB HDD to a 512GB SSD and it auto sizes the new stuff. But yea sounds like you can get around that with using Disk Management in windows to resize an partition and add the missign space (OR partition the unused space).
 
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J

JESSE1408

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Apr 22, 2017
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Thank you everyone for your input, as those of you suggested, I went to the disk management section and "extended" the drive to its appropriate size - now to see if Windows will boot up properly.
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