New cloned hard drive shows size of old drive

New registered user of Acronis TI 11 Home. Windows XP OS.

Goal: replace old 80GB hard drive with new Seagate 200GB drive.

Please note that before cloning old drive, I hooked up the new drive as slave, and it appeared properly as a 200GB drive.

"Successfully" cloned old drive using automatic mode of TI 11. Pulled old drive out of pc, moved new drive to end of data cable, changed jumpers on new drive to master.

Problem: New drive appears as same size as old drive. Using this forum and post #4,661 from Menorcaman, I used Manage Acronis SecureZone Wizard to create a temporary Secure Zone of 1GB in the unallocated space. Then I used the same wizard to remove the SZ. I think I allocated it to the unused space--seemed automatic. I rebooted and voila, no change. Still showing up as a 80 GB hard drive.

How can I get it to appear as the bigger drive? How can I avoid this problem next time? Thanks, Marc

 

My advice is to

1. make an image backup(not a clone) of your source drive c: partition. For some reason in your system the option to expand the clone to fill all the available space of new hard drive was not available(it happens on some systems)

2. partition your new hard drive. (just make sure that the partition that you will be restoring the above boot partition is at least 1gb larger than the source partition : example if your old hard drive c: drive is 20gb, you need to restore it into a 21gb partition) this will prevent drive letter change problems with windows xp. Any other non-system partitions on your source drive can be restored to any size partitions on your new drive.

3. restore your backup to the new hard drive, expand the image to take up all the space on the new partition.

Note:
1. image backups of bootable partitions will be automatically bootable on a new hard drive (no need to copy mbr)
2. cloning an old hard drive will also copy the mbr, that's why the new hard drive shows the size of the old hard drive. The new hard drive thinks it's the old hard drive.

Above is how I do all my restorations, never had the new hard drive displaying the wrong size.

 

I have used this SZ trick many a time and it worked for me everytime. Did you make sure to NOT accept the default to activate the Startup Recovery Manager?

 

If your statement "I think I allocated it to the unused space" is referring to what you did when removing the temporary SZ, then that's the problem. When you remove the SZ you need to allocate the space to one of your partitions; not leave it as unused space. Sorry if I'm reading your statement incorrectly.

 

Jonyjoe, DwnNdrty, k0lo,

Many thanks for your quick replies. I decide to exhaust the SZ trick before resorting to a complete new image.

I've tried several times, still with no luck. I am being careful not to activate default Startup Recovery Manager.

In removing the SZ, I am allocating space from the established secure zone back to my partition--this is my only "partition"--I did not partition the drive.

I allocate 2GB to SZ--after allocation it changes the size of the "partition" appropriately. And then when I use TI to remove the SZ, all is back to the original size--just like the old disk. A couple of times when I rebooted after establishing the SZ, a new hardware wizard appeared. It tried to find appropriate software, then gave up. I'm not sure what this means.

Would working with the BIOS do any good?

Thank you all again--I really appreciate your continued help. This is getting aggravating.

Marc

 

Marc:

Try the operation from the recovery CD so that Windows does not "get in the way". If you haven't created a recovery CD, go to Tools > Create Bootable Rescue Media.

Question - is this a Dell laptop?

 

Hi Mark,

Thanks, but as I was attempting this, some other flaky stuff starting happening and I got ARC and HAL errors. The reason I embarked on this mission was because I thought my hard drive was failing--occasional failure on cold boot--but now I believe that it's probably a failing motherboard/power system. It's a home-built desktop, 5 years old. When I opened the case I noticed some corroded capacitors--which someone warned me about.

Bottom line, I'm going to punt and start putting together a parts list for a new machine. It's time. Nothing fancy, just needs to be quiet--I'm starting to get a permanent whine in my ears. But I thank you and the others for helping me. I really appreciate your help.

Best,
Marc

 

The electrolytic capacitors probably have a brownish residue on them suggesting that they are leaking or have leaked in the past. Most likely they are not holding a proper charge. Replacement of the motherboard is an appropriate step to take.

Bruce
Amateur Radio k0ehn

 

Marc5,
Do you have a disk or partition backup image? If yes, then you could do a partition restore with resizing. This would enable you to specify the size of the partition.