Hello,
I created an image from a 1 TB drive, installed a 3 TB drive and restored from image.
When I checked the space availability, I saw that I have “553 GB free of 931 GB.”
How can I restore in a way that the system recognized the 3 TB?
Thank you in advance.
Window 7 Ultimate x64
I'm assuming you are using Windows inbuilt imaging.
One of the issues here is that HDDs conventionally (& still do in my systems) have an old Master Boot Record (MBR) standard. This little 512 byte record lives on the first physical 512 bytes of your HDD. It contains a partition table that only recognizes up to a 2 TB partition. You can definitely recover the unallocated space up to 2 TB using Disk Management or a better tool (free) Partition Wizard.
You could try partitioning the HDD into say a 1 TB plus 2TB partitions but I'm not sure if this would give you full 3 TB access. You really need to move to the UEFI/GPT standard rather than the old MBR for HDDs greater than 2TB. The really simple solution is to keep your OS drive to 1TB and use the 3 TB as a data drive. The 3 TB drive can be GPT formatted as a data drive and work with an MBR OS drive. Alternatively, do a clean install to the 3TB formatted GPT.
Check in Disk Management. The remainder space is unallocated. You can use that for additional partitions. If you operate on a MBR disk, don't make any partition larger than 2TBs (2.2TBs to be exact).
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