only getting 1/4 of my hard drive

therocker39

New Member
I just upgraded the hard drive in my dell E1505 laptop from an 80gb 5400rpm hd to a 320gb 7200rpm hd I used apricorn drive wire and apricorn ezgig II cloning software to clone the old drive to the new but after installing the new hard drive in the laptop it is now only an 80gb hard drive there is no unallocated space to partition I checked the bios and it says I have an 80gb hard drive is there any way to regain the lost 240gb or did i ruin my hard drive


Thanks for any help
 
as I had stated there is no unallocated space it is reading a 320gb hd as an 80gb hd the other 240gb are just not beeing seen by the computer not in the bios not in disc manager not at all but thanks for your suggestion
 
no when I first hooked up the drive it read as a 320gb hd and the old drive is a toshiba and is clearly labled and the new drive is a western digital also clearly labled and the toshiba is on my desk the western digital is in my laptop but again thanks for your input
 
Maybe this apricorn software did something to this new drive to make it only use 80gb. Western digital has their own Acronis True image software to clone drives, I would have downloaded that and used it. You may need to download western digitals drive utility and run it and see whats its got for space now.
 
Ithought the same thing and downloaded both acronis and digtal lifeguard from westerndigital and tried wiping the hard drive clean and using western digitals software but it made no difference I have been researching this on other forums as well some may think it has to do with the mbr file others think it might be the dell bios though i bought the drive from dell and they say it can handle drives up to 500gb
 
Thats really a odd one. Even with the software you used it still should have shown up as unallocated space. Even odd if it was a bios limit, over the years it kinda went 32GB/64GB then up to 120GB. 80GB is just a odd number even for a limit.

Look in the bios under the Standard CMOS setting(what most call it) usually the first setup page and see if someone has the drive channel setup as manual instead of Auto.
 
Boot off a Linux Live cd if you have one and have it read the HD to see if it is an OS limit.

If you hook the drive into another computer does it recognize the hole thing?
 
Format it on your desktop and lay down a new partition maybe get different results?


Good idea. Delete the partition thats on it and see what size shows up to be partitioned. Because in your fifth post you said when you first hooked it up it showed as a 320
 
Last edited:
I fixed the problem I found a post on another forum what I needed to do was boot from my windows xp disk go to repair console and run fix mbr then boot from a disk containing a program called hdat2 and rest the hpa and walla i have a 320gb hd here is a link to the solution I found that has links to the software and a more detailed explanation for anyone who might run into the same problem

http://forum.acronis.com/forum/4395


Thank you to all that tried to help I hope I can return the favor some day
 
Back
Top