Hi, this is my first post.

Here is the situation;

I have an 80GB Seagate hard drive that I have been using for 5 years+, and I decided rather than have it fail and replace it, I would simply replace it now. So i got a 160GB Seagate Hard drive to replace it. This drive is for my C: Local Disk with my OS on it.

When I used HDClone to clone it, it cloned just fine, but now my 160GB drive thinks its actually only 80GB and 80GB of space is unallocated. I want it to be one big drive, not seperated at all.

Maybe I would like to leave it as an "80GB" and RAID stripe it with my old one? Can I do that?

Any help is appreciated.

You now have a 160GB drive holding an 80GB partition and 80GB of free space. You have 2 choices:

1. Make an 80GB D: drive out of the free space. You can do this in Windows, using the Disk Management selection in Computer Management.

2. Expand the partition without losing data using a 3rd-party program like Partition Magic. I believe the free GParted program can also do this, but I have never used it. I would recommend that if you do this option, that you hold your original 80GB off to the side as a back up until you're sure that the partition has been expanded without any issues.

I've never played with HDClone. It may have an option to resize the partition while doing the transfer. If not, Ghost allows you to do this. As this is after the fact, you will probably have to resort to SomeJoe's suggestion of PartitionMagic or GParted and resizing the partition.

Good luck!
Luke

You cant Raid Strip.

SomeJoe7777 said it all. Partition magic will do the trick.

SomeJoe7777's advice to use Partition Magic and resize is the best way. But if you don't want to get that software, there is an alternative that basically starts from square one, but is free.

Your new drive is a Seagate. If you go to their website you can find and download for free their software specifically for this job of migrating from an older drive to a new larger one. It is part of their Disk Wizard package. It will only make copies onto their own Seagate drive, so it suits you.

The software has a set of options that let you, in one set of choices and in one operation, partition a new drive into whatever volume(s) you want (including one large volume of the complete drive), format the partition, copy absolutely everything from the old drive to the new one (adjusting so that the new drive is NOT limited by the size of the old one), and make the new one bootable. You then shut down your machine, remove the old drive for safe temporary storage, and hook up the new drive as the C:\ drive, making any necessary changes in the BIOS setup.

There are three "gotchas" to watch for here:
1. You already have done this once, although it did not work out as planned. So your new drive may have new settings, etc on it. If you go back and clone the old one to the new one with Disk Wizard, you will be back to the conditions of the old drive and lose any recent changes on the new one.
2. Disk Wizard is designed to start with a blank new HDD. It will check, however, and pop up a warning that you have data on the new destination drive and are about to destroy it. That's OK in this case, so don't panic. Just be VERY sure you know which is the old drive you are copying from, and which is the new destination drive!!
3. To use any drive over 137 GB (M$ Windows calls this 128 GB), you must have support for larger drives (formally called "48-bit LBA support" ) in your hardware HDD controller and in the OS. Most recent computers (since about 2000), and ALL that use SATA drives, have the hardware support you need. On the OS side, Windows XP original did not have this, but it was added with Service Pack 1 and later. So if you do not have your OS updated sufficiently, that must be done before you try to make your drive work as one large volume. Otherwise the system will refuse to make a partition over 137 GB, and you'll be making a second partition along the lines of one option outlined by SomeJoe7777.

To use Disk Wizard this way you will have to install it on your system and run it under Windows. That way it will know that your OS is able to use volumes over 137 GB. In your case, what this means is you would have to re-arrange your machine as if you had just received the new HDD. In other words you set it up so the old disk is C:\ and you're running from there, and the new one is probably D:\. Then you download and install Disk Wizard on the (old) C:\ drive, and run it to clone C:\ to the new drive. When done, you remove the old C:\ and swap as outlined above.