Lost hdd space

I used clone disk. I wanted to transfer the entire used space from a 60 gig hdd to a 100 gig hdd. Both hdd's are seagate Momentus 7200.1 sata. The 60 gig hdd was in my Dell Inspiron 1705e notebook. The 100gig hdd was in a external case connected via usb. Here's the problem. The 100gig hdd only shows 55gig's now.No operating system, files or anything. Is there a way of recovering the lost gig's?
I used Image 10 Home 1 Windows Digital River
TIA
Rick

 

rycks,

Have a look in Disk Management. Right click My Computer, Manage, Disk Management. What does it say about your external HD? Capacity? Free Space? Unallocated space?

How much used space do you have on the 60 GB HD? Is it a single partition? Any FAT Diagnostic Partition to the left of the C: drive in Disk Management?

 

rycks,
I had a similar experience just two days ago using TI 9.0 cloning with Dell Inspiron 9400 which has an internal SATA 100GB drive and 2.5" 160GB SATA in an external USB case. I cloned setting the new partitions to same size as original hoping to leave unallocated space at the end of the drive. But the drive now seems to be only 100GB. Disk manager in XP reports no unallocated space. Knoppix CD Linux reports 160GB disk is now 100GB. Cloned drive installed in notebook boots and logs in fine.
Deleted all partitions on the new drive but it is still reported as 100GB unallocated. I logged a support call with Acronis support yesterday but no response yet.

Gavan

 

Following further research and some investigation into IDE disk drives I found that there are low level IDE commands to set and retrieve the max LBA. Also a call to retrieve the native max LBA. Some systems and applications take advantage of the ability to set Max LBA less than the Max Native LBA thus creating what is called the Host Protect Area (HPA). I found a tool HDAT2 from http://www.hdat2.com that provides the means to read and set the Max LBA.

In my case it appears that the Max LBA was set 60GB less than the Max Native LBA when I did the clone.

HDAT2 let me reset the Max LBA to the Native Max LBA thus removing the HPA.

I used the tool because I didn't have any data on my clone drive that I cared about so be aware it may delete all data on the drive.

This is a low level tool use at your own risk and make sure you pick the correct hard drive when you run it.

I have yet to do a successful clone to a disk of a different size. But I will try a few more times, I will log progress here if I am successful

Hope this helps

Cheers

Gavan

 

Gavan,

Have you enough free space available to create an entire disk image and store it on the 100 GB? You can store an image of C: on C: itself, it works, just ignore the warning about being unsafe to keep it there.

Then you would restore that image to the 160 GB (as an entire disk restore) which would give you 60 GB unallocated.

Alternatively, you could perform a partitions restore with resize (all partions & MBR) and so determine the amount of the resulting unallocated space to suit the size of the planned new partition.

Imaging/restoring is safer and more flexible than cloning.

 

Thanks for the replies. I down loaded "disc wizard starter edition version 10.50 from Seagate's web site. Using the tools I was able to recover the lost GB's. I tryed to clone the hd again and the same thing happened. I'm about to quit using this problem.

 

Thanks for the help as suggested I created an image on an alternate disk.
I tried a full restore from the image but the problem of missing 60GB disk space and the Max LBA being set to th 91GB mark was still present.

Assuming it was something to do with the custom Dell MBR I restored the partitions I wanted. Left out the Dell recovery and Multimedia partitions and the MBR. Booted an xp disk into system recovery and fixed the MBR.

All appears well I now have the full amount of disk as expected, can boot and run windows when installed internally and can use the backup drive in an external case till/if it is needed.

Cheers

Gavan