Hard drive displaying wrong capacity after cloning, help!

I recently purchased a Seagate Momentus 2.5" 5400.3 160 gig SATA drive to upgrade from my Hitachi travelstar 5400 sata 60 gig, in my Dell XPS m1210 laptop.

I used a program that came with an external enclosure I bought (Apricron EZ upgrade kit), it looks very similar to Acronis True Image. After cloning the drives, I popped in the new Seagate, and my computer wouldn't boot up properly. I decided to then reformat the drive, and start over again using Acronis TrueImage instead.

But I then noticed that, my drive was now displayed as a 60 gig (49.7 free), exactly the same as the original Hitachi, although the description was still the Seagate model.

I then cloned it again, using AcronisTrue Image, this time it booted correctly, but it's still displaying as a 60 gig. I looked, and there's no hidden partitions or unallocated space. If someone knows how I can get the right capacity back, I'd appreciate it!

Has anyone found a solution to this problem?

I am having the exact same problem.

I cloned my 60GB Hitachi HD to a 160GB Seagate on my Dell Inspiron E1705 usin Norton Ghost. Now my 160GB shows up with the exact same size as the original Hitachi and there is no unpartitioned space to account for the remaining 100GB.

I ended up sending my drive back for a replacement because I could not figure out a way to have my system recognize the lost space. I used Norton Ghost to make the clone the first time, using the default settings. After receiving the replacement, I cloned my 50GB laptop drive to an old 60GB 3.5" drive, just to check if it would then see it as a 50GB drive. I used XXClone to make the copy, and it worked without any problems. I then cloned my 50GB laptop drive to the new 150GB drive, and that also worked fine. I think what happened when I cloned with Norton Ghost, was that it replaced the Volume ID and Serial # of the new drive, with that of the old drive. If you have two of the same drives, or have a friend that might have the same drive, you can probably clone their drive's Volume ID to yours. You may also be able to contact the manufacturer of the drive to see if they have a tool to replace or rewrite the volume ID. Good luck. Let me know what you end up doing.

And that was using an XPS laptop, both drives are 2.5'

I was able to fix this problem after reading this page
http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm
It explains in detail what happened and why the clone wont work.
I downloaded the "magic boot disk (mhdd)"
Boot from the cd, type in HPA
type in the correct size (the large number that it shows)
then type in fdisk to repartion the drive.
Your drive is now fixed,

Magic Boot Disk did not work for me. Any other ideas? I had it happen after cloning with Norton Ghost. I tried all kind of fixes and then bought another new drive. I cloned with Seagate Disk Wizzard - same result.

I'm not going to buy another drive. I need to fix one or both of these. There's got to be a way. PLEASE HELP

GolferBob, in Seagate's Disk Wizard you have the tools to fix this. By the way, Disk Wizard appears to be a customized version of Acronis True Image, and it also will do these things.

Disk Wizard, free for download from the Seagate website, is designed for (among other things) the common task of upgrading your machine to replace a previous C: boot disk with a new one that is much larger, but contains absolutely everything from the original so that the new one completely replaces the original (smaller) C: drive. I'm assuming this is your task. A small warning: Seagate supplies this software free to anyone so they can use it to clone an old drive of whatever maker onto ONLY a Seagate drive as the new one. (Well, maybe it also works for Maxtor Destination Drives, since they are part of Seagate.) If you are cloning TO another maker's drive, look for other software, like a trial version of Acronis True Image.

First, a few conditions. To deal with hard drives larger than 137 GB (HDD maker's specs) or 128 GB (Windows' way of counting) you MUST have what is called "48-bit LBA Support" in your hard drive (obviously included in any unit this large), in the mobo controller the drive plugs into, and in the OS (e.g., Windows). Regarding the mobo's HDD controller, most systems built after about 2000 will have it, and many older systems can be updated with a BIOS update / burn if necessary. ALL SATA controllers and drives have this. Regarding the OS, Windows XP did NOT have this system in its original version but it was added in Service Pack 1 and maintained later. Windows 2000 had it added with a late SP. VISTA has it in all forms. So, if you are installing Windows XP from an original version disk you won't have the ability to make and use Partitions over 128 GB. However, for what we're about to do here (which is not an install of XP), even an XP install that has been updated to include any of the Service Packs will allow you to proceed using Disk Manager.

To be sure of all this, Disk Manager should be INSTALLED on your C: drive that has XP updated to at least SP1, or VISTA. That way it knows that your OS can handle large hard disks properly. If you simply run Disk Manager from a CD (which is allowed) it will not be able to check for 48-bit LBA Support and, to protect you from big trouble, will assume you don't have it and refuse to make very large Partitions.

When you run disk Manager from your C: drive you need to work through the menus. Find the place that makes a clone from an old SOURCE DRIVE to a new DESTINATION DRIVE, and be VERY sure you specify the right one as DESTINATION because the operation will replace all old info on that drive. The utility will actually do two steps for you in one operation - Partition (create the "drive" ) and Format (create the File System on that drive). Within the menu system, find these choices to set.

1. Set the Source and Destination hard disk units.

2. In your case you already have a Primary Partition on the new Destination HDD because of your previous attempt. You must delete that and start from a new blank drive on the Destination unit. This may be a separate step, or it may be part of the setup for the whole job.

2. You want it to create a Primary Partition with a size you choose. In making a clone for you, it may default to making the Destination one the exact same size as the Source. This is probably the part that caused your current problem. You want to specify, instead, that it should use ALL of the available space on the drive.

3. Specify that the new Destination drive should be a Bootable drive.

4. For the formatting part, specify the File System - I expect you want NTFS. Few people need FAT32.

Run this and you should get what you want. When it's done, I suggest you disconnect your old drive (both power and data cables) and re-connect the new drive's data cable to the port that was originally for the old drive. That way your machine will still boot from the same place it always did, but you should find that it is exactly the same as your old C: drive but with a lot more space. When you're happy the new system is working perfectly, you can decide what to do with the old drive. Maybe you just re-connect it (to a new SATA port) and use Disk Manager again, only this time you just Delete all its old Partitions and then create a new Primary Partition that is empty, formatted with an NTFS file system and ready to use for data. If that's what you do, set the options so it is NOT a bootable drive.

To rockchalk: The Seatools package you mention is very useful for lots of things, including diagnosing and fixing problems on Seagate drives. But the specific tool you mention is not for OP's problem. Seagate has an interesting design feature in its drives' controller boards. It is for the situation (I had to do this) in which you install a new drive over 137 GB (maker's specs) on an older machine that cannot be updated to include 48-bit LBA in its BIOS disk controller. You can use Seatools to set that kind of disk to limit itself to that maximum size (or any other you choose) to prevent accidentally trying to go over that limit. In my case, I limited a 160 GB unit to believing it was only 137 GB. As a companion to that tool, Seatools also has one to undo that limit you set and return the drive to its full physical capacity. However, that does not change anything about the Partitions and data on the drive. It only allows you to use Partitioning and Formatting tools to re-arrange those structures using whatever capacity the drive has.