Hard Drives?

[Grandpappy]

Can anyone assist,please?
Some weeks ago I did a full backup of my C drive( It was a smallish 120Gb SSD) to an external drive which I kept separately,of course! However,after appreciating the speed of the SSD drive I decided to have a larger SSD installed a 500Gb. I then installed the previously created backup,from the external drive, onto the 'new' SSD drive,OK! the trouble is I now have an SSD drive that shows shows my old SSD capacity whenever I click on the disc 'Properties'.
Can anyone help me get back the 'lost' 350Gb of disc space?
Many thanks in advance
Cheers

[bhg481]

What operating system are you running? It sounds like you created a system image and then copied that back to your new drive. If that's the case you need to go into Computer Management (via Control Panel) and look at the Disc Management option. You will probanle find an unused area on your new disc which you can either set up as a new partition or extend one of your other partitions into it.

[VHG]

What did you use to make the backup?

When you did the restore did you get the chance to increase the size of the partition?

I use a product called Macrium Reflect (Free edition) to make an image of my disks and when I do a restore I get the chance to change the size of the partitions.

So if I do an image backup from say a 500Gb disk, when I do the restore I can increase the size of one of the partitions to make it fit a 1Tb disk for example.

[Grandpappy]

thanks bhg481 for the prompt reply. I have looked the the state of the drives (right click on computer ,then Manage,etc.) and there is an 'unallocated' are of about 360GB showing on the right of my C drive! Trouble is,I don't know how to extend one of the other partitions? I don't think we can add attachments to these messages,'cos I've taken a screengrab which shows the whole structure?
Anyway,I'm making progress!!
Cheer PS. I'm running Windows7 Home Premium 64bit

[VHG]

I believe Windows 7 has an option built in to increase or decrease the size of a partition (I have never done it but various web sites say you can do it).

You can read more here

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

[bhg481]

In Disk Management, the bottom half of the screen, if you right-click on a partition you get the option to shrink/expand etc. You can expand any partition into the spare space next to it OR set up the spare space as a new partition. You can then format the new partition and allocate a drive letter to it. I can't experiment myself at the moment because I've not got a spare disc, so just give it a bash. You can't lose as you've still got your original 128GB SSD to fall back on.

[Grandpappy]

Hi all!,
I got a 'Leon' (off the web)who explained what I should do:- "Click on Computer-right click and select 'Manage' then click on Disk Management,in my case it was -disc 0 with 362GB unallocated,right click(on the unallocated section) and a menu drops down giving the option to 'Extend'- just click next and windows extends the drive to take up the unallocated 362GB! Easy,peasy!!!
I haven't written any of this down but I must thank everyone who tried to help me,very kind and cheers

[hc4361]

Don't mind me asking but how much was the 500GB SSD?

[Grandpappy]

hc4361 - The Crucial 500GB SSD was just under £150

[hc4361]

Great - the prices have really come down lately.
I saved by buying a 1TB hybrid drive for £60 but intend adding a smaller SSD for the OS.
Even the hybrid drive is whizzy in comparison to the standard HDD.

[VHG]

Strange choice for "best answer" !!!!