I recently upgraded my laptop's secondary HDD from a 320GB Western Digital to a 640GB Samsung. Before performing the hardware swap, I created a disk image of my drive, and saved it to an external USB drive. I swapped the hardware, and then restored the image from USB to my new internal drive.
The problem is, Windows 7 still reports only ~300GB total disk space (equivalent to the 320GB drive) when it should be showing ~600GB. The partition manager sees the partition, and correctly reports that the partition is ~600GB in size. But the file explorer disagrees, only showing the original 300GB of disk space.
I'm assuming this is a problem with the MFT that was transferred as a part of the imaging process, but I'm not sure.
Any help you fine folks can provide would certainly be appreciated. Thanks in advance!
Best Answer
This is a great question. Here's the problem: you copied over only one partition (a partition is like a virtual hard drive). Open the start menu. Right click on "My Computer" (or computer if you're on Vista or 7) and choose "Manage." Then, go to disk management, select the unpartitioned space, and partition it as NTFS. You'll have two separate virtual hard drives, but you'll have all the space on the disk. If you want only one hard drive to appear, you'll need to use a third party partition management utility like http://www.partition-tool.com/easeus-partition-manager .