Robbed of 30GB of space during hard drive swap. Why?

I have an older HP Pavilion 511n which came with a 40GB hard drive, but I recently decided to upgrade to a 160GB drive. I decided to use Acronis Migrate 7.0 Trial Version just to swap the drives and then later decide whether to add the smaller (original) drive. Right now I don't need it and I don't want it consuming power from my 150W source (though I'm about to upgrade that too).

Anyway, I used Acronis Migrate and it worked really well. The cloning took about 30 min after which I swapped the drives and booted my computer. I noticed two drives (or partitions). One was the new drive (C: ) at about 132GB (at least that's what it says now) and then another (E: ) with 20-30GB. I looked in the latter and it had a bunch of files I assumed were there for backup from the cloning. Anyway, device manager told me to reboot again to integrate the new hardware so I did, but this time the E: partition didn't show up anymore and I'm left with C: only at 132GB instead of the 160GB I should have (or 164GB to be more accurate).

Is there anything I can do to get that space back?

 

Generally speaking, you will always lose some HD space due to parities and so forth. I'm running an SATA 160gb that shows as 146gb. To be sure that something wierd isn't going on: Right click My Computer, click Manage, double click Storage, double click Disk Management. You'll be shown the drive and any partitions that are there and the status of these partitions (healthy, active, unallocated, whatever). If it shows a 'mystery' 20-30gb partition, and there's nothing on it you'll need in future, use a tool like BootIT NG to remove that partition and resize the main partition. It could be that it's a 'hidden' partition put there at the HP factory for an 'F10' system recovery. If you see a message like 'Press F10 for system recovery' right when you power up the PC, that's probably what it is. When you used Acronis to migrate the data, it took the original 20gb drive (and it's partitions) and adjusted the partition sizes using a ratio, making the new drive the same as far as percentage of space per partition. Is this confusing yet? I'm trying to be as clear as possible... anyway, do the Disk Management procedure, and post what you find.

hopperdave2000

 

I think you nailed it.

I used disk management and got the following:

HP_PAVILION (C: ) Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (System) 133GB (capacity) 108GB (free)

HP_RECOVERY Partition Basic FAT32 Healthy (EISA Configuration) 20GB (capacity) 16GB (free)

I guess I need the HP_RECOVERY partition just in case (or do I?), but I probably don't need to leave 16GB of free space there. So I should be able to get my C: drive to 149GB total capacity which is about what you have, right?

I have Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 if that helps (but I've never used it). How should I proceed?

And thanks for the help.

 

Beware of deleting the manufacturers partitions. They are usually the first ones on the disk so the boot manager has to look at the second to boot Windows. If you delete the first partition the Windows partition may become the first and you may have to change boot.ini to suit. So make a boot floppy before you change the partitions.


Studio T

 

Honestly, Mr. Edge, I'd leave everything alone. You run the chance of really screwing things up (as stated by the knowledgeable StudioT) by removing or resizing the HP recovery partition....
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

 

Creating a Windows boot floppy is still a good idea, as is creating a password floppy for when you forget your XP user password.

Studio T

 

Okay, but what about just shrinking the HP_RECOVERY partition instead of deleting it? I mean, there's 16GB of free space just sitting there...

 

I guess I don't need that extra 16GB right now but I'd like to know whether it's serving some purpose there or whether it's just an artifact of Acronis Migrate's proportional resizing?

 

I don't think I have an XP user password (or if I did I've forgotten it long time ago)... But I guess a boot floppy wouldn't hurt.

 

I suppose you could resize the partition to reclaim the 16gb. To be safe, I'd go with 15gb to make sure you don't vaporize the tail end of some data. I've used BootIT NG many times to safely resize partitions. It makes a boot floppy that boots into a Windows-like GUI that's VERY easy use....