why is my 2TB SSD showing up as 1TB?

Evatron · 7 Apr 2024 at 16:29

hi everybody! its been a while but i rate this forum as champions of tech support.

i had a 1TB SSD as my C: drive. over time i needed more space and bought a 2TB SSD and cloned the 1TB SSD to it using macrium reflect, then swapped them out.
everything worked fine but when i went to check out the new free space i had...

i just want to replicate my C: drive onto a drive with more free space for it to use. how do i do this?

The1nonly1 · 7 Apr 2024 at 16:44

When you clone, it clones it exactly as it was so going from 1tb to 2tb drive will only clone the 1tb partition. Likely you'll need to extend the partition in disk management.

Murphy · 7 Apr 2024 at 16:45

It's probably because you cloned the drive instead of creating an image, cloning a drive copies the content of the drive and the partition layout so 1TB drive will always be 1TB, what you want to do is create an image of the drive so your imaging software can resize the partitions to fit on the new drive.

If still have the OG drive you can simply make an image, instead of cloning it, and apply that image to the new drive. If you don't have the OG drive any more you'll need to resize the partitions, you won't be able to do this on the system drive while it's in use so you'd need to download a partition editing program (something like gparted), burn it to a USB stick, boot into it, and then resize them.

PC777 · 7 Apr 2024 at 16:51

I just dealt with this last week after cloning a 500GB SSD to 2TB M2 NVME. All you need to do is right click on the new drive in disk management and then select Extend Volume. You can then assign the rest of the drive amount to all of it, or a much of it as you want.

john_smith · 7 Apr 2024 at 16:54

As above. Disk management and extend the volume.

john_smith · 7 Apr 2024 at 16:55

[Windows 11/10] Hard disk Partition, Shrink, and Extend | Official Support | ASUS

Evatron · 7 Apr 2024 at 18:02

appreciate the replies everyone! glad to know i dont have to reformat and start over.

Evatron · 8 Apr 2024 at 21:34

Murphy said:
It's probably because you cloned the drive instead of creating an image, cloning a drive copies the content of the drive and the partition layout so 1TB drive will always be 1TB, what you want to do is create an image of the drive so your imaging software can resize the partitions to fit on the new drive.

If still have the OG drive you can simply make an image, instead of cloning it, and apply that image to the new drive. If you don't have the OG drive any more you'll need to resize the partitions, you won't be able to do this on the system drive while it's in use so you'd need to download a partition editing program (something like gparted), burn it to a USB stick, boot into it, and then resize them.

can you please explain how i apply an image to a drive? i got as far as making an image to a disc. thanks!

Murphy · 8 Apr 2024 at 23:36

Use Macrium Reflect? If so they have a knowledge base of instructions here...

Restoring a system image - Knowledgebase 8.0 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

knowledgebase.macrium.com

Or you could probably find step by step instructions in the help for the program, I'd try to be more helpful but i don't have a copy of reflect installed ATM and by the sounds of it and how straight forward it should be I'm guessing you want/need highly detailed step by step instructions.

That is unless it's a nervous about making a mistake type of thing, because it should just be a matter of selecting the restore option/tab, selecting your 2TB drive, and then going through a file explorer type thing to select the image you saved. Maybe a prompt to resize it to fill the entire disk, then reboot with the newly imaged 2TB as the boot drive.

Evatron · 9 Apr 2024 at 06:33

Murphy said:
Use Macrium Reflect? If so they have a knowledge base of instructions here...

Restoring a system image - Knowledgebase 8.0 - Macrium Reflect Knowledgebase

knowledgebase.macrium.com

Or you could probably find step by step instructions in the help for the program, I'd try to be more helpful but i don't have a copy of reflect installed ATM and by the sounds of it and how straight forward it should be I'm guessing you want/need highly detailed step by step instructions.

That is unless it's a nervous about making a mistake type of thing, because it should just be a matter of selecting the restore option/tab, selecting your 2TB drive, and then going through a file explorer type thing to select the image you saved. Maybe a prompt to resize it to fill the entire disk, then reboot with the newly imaged 2TB as the boot drive.

ah thanks man. it really is straight forward looking at that. appreciate it.

alex24 · 9 Apr 2024 at 06:39

Am I missing something or in your image it only shows a 90 GB partition? Was your system partition always this size perhaps? You may have just cloned that issue across as well. Perhaps you can share your partition layout for the whole drive?

nade · 9 Apr 2024 at 09:14

My guess is that the clone copied what space was in use but left a bit of wiggle room.

As others have said in the thread, I think simplest thing is to expand the volume. No need to restore any clone/image at all, it will literally take mins to expand the volume - assuming that is what is happening and you see all the free space on the new drive.

SpellowHouse · 9 Apr 2024 at 09:31

alex24 said:
Am I missing something or in your image it only shows a 90 GB partition? Was your system partition always this size perhaps? You may have just cloned that issue across as well. Perhaps you can share your partition layout for the whole drive?

My thoughts exactly. The Windows partition needs to be expanded but the D: drive partition moved. I don't think this can be done with Windows? Does OP need something like Partition Magic?

Evatron · 9 Apr 2024 at 19:11

alex24 said:
Am I missing something or in your image it only shows a 90 GB partition? Was your system partition always this size perhaps? You may have just cloned that issue across as well. Perhaps you can share your partition layout for the whole drive?

was so long ago i honestly dont remember why this was (i didnt build it) but yes. for some reason the partition for the OS is pathetic and that is my core issue. the rest of the drive is empty bar a few program files

again, i didn't build this machine and the drive was already like this. don't ask why it's called "local program files" when almost all of the program files are on C: like normal.

Evatron · 9 Apr 2024 at 21:36

SpellowHouse said:
My thoughts exactly. The Windows partition needs to be expanded but the D: drive partition moved. I don't think this can be done with Windows? Does OP need something like Partition Magic?

yeah, i did. used partition magic to work it out. really shocking disk management cant do such a basic task. then again microsoft made windows 11.

Cyber-Mav · 10 Apr 2024 at 09:43

had issue before where disk management cant extend the volume probably because the empty space is not right next to it. used partition wizard and it did it with no issues.

andshrew · 11 Apr 2024 at 15:32

Evatron said:
yeah, i did. used partition magic to work it out. really shocking disk management cant do such a basic task. then again microsoft made windows 11.

To be fair, it's not really a basic task. It's actually quite non-trivial to do, technically speaking, not to mention high risk of something going wrong if the process were interrupted (which is likely why they don't provide the functionality). To expand your C drive in this case it has to physically shift all of the data that is currently after it (ie. recovery partition, F partition) to the very end of the disk, so that the "free space" then becomes available directly after C.