Hard Drive Cloning Issue

Computer Forum Storage Devices
1

Hey Guys,
I appreciate any help you can offer me with this little issue I am having.
I have a Dell Dimension 3000 and it has a 160 GB hard drive that I am running out of space on.

I bought a new WD 500 GB hard drive and decided I wanted to clone my old hard drive to the new one. I used O&O Disk Image to do this operation. The cloning process went smooth and the new hard drive booted properly. The problem I have now is that the new hard drive was partitioned to exactly match the old one, so here is what it looks like:

An FAT partition with Dell Recover on it
A NTFS partition with the main date on it.
An FAT32 partition with some other Dell recovery information on it.
316 GB of unallocated Disk Space

Now the problem is that the main NTFS partition is exactly the same size as the old one and the unallocated space is sitting out there. I tried to use O&O and Partition Magic 8.0 to merge the unallocated space into the C: drive but Partition Magic tells me it cannot be merged. The only thing that I can do is format that section and give it a new name but I still cannot merge it with the C: drive.

Help!!
how can I fix this problem by either doing the process over with a different software that will avoid this problem or fix the problem as is?

Thanks for all the help,
Chip T

2

if i understand correctly, what i think you need to do is move the FAT32 partition to the end of the drive then resize the OS partition to encompass the unallocated free space

IMO: PM is crap, when symantec bought PM from PowerQuest they ruined it, personally i’d recommend GParted Live CD & it’s FOSS (Free Open Source Software)

3

Thanks for the reply man.
So your saying I should use the Gparted Live CD software to move the FAT32 part to the end and then use it to put the unallocated space into the C: drive I have now?

4

exactly, GParted is much better than PM simply because you boot off the CD then everthing is done from outside the OS

BTW: chkdsk may want to run on first boot after messing with partitions, just leave to do it’s thing

5

I am going to try to do that and see if it works. Do you think it is best to use the USB or CD option to boot from?

6

in reaility it doesn’t make any difference, but i’d choose CD

good luck

Edit: but it could be an age thing, or maybe i’m more comfortable with burning .ISOs to CDr / RW

7

Hey man, the I used the Gparted live CD and it worked perfect. I was able to move the partition down and move the unallocated space up and merge it into the C drive. This now gave me a C: with all the unallocated space that I had before and my operating system is working just fine.

I appreciate all the help.

8

GParted is excellent, personally i use it mostly in Linux but i also use it to resize vista partition

good :beer: