Missing space on new hard drive

[Feckem2011]

I have just replaced my old 500GB hard drive with a new 3TB drive. I took a disc image of old drive and using the rescue boot disc used the image to boot the new drive. All my data etc is there but the computer only sees 500 GB. How can I access the other 2.5 TB. I have tried disc management but it only shows 500GB.

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Is the missing portion shown as unallocated space, or is it not shown at all?

Probably best to post a screen shot of what you see in Disk Management.

Did you initialize this new 3 TB disc as GPT? If you don't you'll never be able to see more than 2.2 TB of it.

 

[Feckem2011]

Thanks for your reply. Space not showing at all. Will post screenshot as soon as I'm back near computer. And excuse my ignorance but how do I initialise disc as GPT?

 

[ignatzatsonic]

As part of the format process, you should be asked if you want to use MBR or GPT. That refers to the type of partition table.

You MUST initialize as GPT if you want to use more than 2.2 TB.

But I think you may have an insurmountable problem.

Your old hard drive is almost certainly MBR.

I'm not at all sure you can restore an image of an MBR disc to a GPT disc, which is what you would be doing.

A brief look at Google doesn't find any quick answer saying you can.

This may give you some more info:

http://www.sevenforums.com/backup-restore/345831-image-3tb-hdd-gpt-2t-image-mbr-possible.html

Are you willing to live with only 2.2 GB of that 3 TB drive? If you are, you should be able to do that. You'd just initialize the disk as MBR and forego the additional space.

But I'm guessing your new disc was initialized as MBR, so we don't know why you can't see the 2.2 GB.

So post the screen shot.

Did you in fact format this new disk at all? Or did you just install it as you bought it and then immediately restore that image? If you didn't format it, that may explain why you see only 500 GB.

Maybe someone else has more info about trying to restore an MBR image to a GPT disk. If it can't be done, you'd need to do a clean install instead of restoring that image.

 

[RolandJS]

Acronis True Image 2015 may or may not be able to help here. I never cloned an MBR-image onto a GPT HD. There is one more workaround. If OP kept the old harddrive in the computer, as a 2nd HD [no longer primary/boot], after you've reinstalled OS onto 3TB/GPT harddrive; it is possible to copy all the created and download material from MBR to GPT as a folder-copy/file-copy. Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong about such folder/file copy.