Windows not showing correct free space on my hard drive

Question

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!

Solution

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 .

Comments

[cdhowie]

This should really be over on Superuser.

[Admin]

Stackoverflow is for programming questions. I think you either want Superuser or Serverfault.

[Supercereal]

+1 If he is using Windows7 he can just extend the partition using disk management.

[Sandri]

Thanks for the quick response, guys. The problem is, Windows 7's Disk Management utility actually says the entire partition is active and healthy, with a size of 596.17GB. Windows Explorer says that the disk's total capacity is only 298GB. Any other ideas?

[Sandri]

Also note that when I try to use the "Shrink Volume..." function to adjust the size of the partition by ANY amount, I get an error: "The parameter is incorrect."