Thanks in advance for taking any time to help. Hi everyone. I'm between beginner and intermediate with computers. Here's the situation: Updating computer... new ram, cleaning out old files... etc. Upgrade from 40g drive to 160g. Looked at a number of cloning software and found HD clone 3.2.9 free edition. Everthing came across fine. I'm running from the new drive now. Kept the old drive in the box... still attached, just changed boot in bios to exlude the old drive. BUT- the new clone reads the same size as the old drive through "my computer" "properties". Over 100g lost. So I used RUN in the start tab menu and the compmgmt.msc feature. Under "storage" I go to "disk management". (C:) 37.24 GB NFTS Healthy (System) and 111.81 GB unallocated (E:) 37.24 GB NFTS Healthy (Active) So, it looks like everthing has taken well, and I can just uninstall the old drive (unless you tell me otherwise). But, I need to regain the space on the new one and get XP to recognize it. I'm not sure if the other space is partitioned or... well, I just don't know! Can you help?

matt3, "Kept the old drive in the box... still attached, just changed boot in bios to exlude the old drive." 'still attached',is it 'C' drive? There can be only one. In order to keep the old drive around, change the jumper so it becomes 'D'. What about your OS? On new drive? HTH. Ed in Texas.

You cloned your old drive and then installed the clone into the new drive. You are not missing any thing at all. The clone program copied your old drive(37.24g) which is no the "e"drive which you can safely remove. This leaves the "c" drive of 37,24g as system and the unallocated space the rest of the drive... navigate to disc management again and then right click the unallocated drive and choose to format it. It will probably ask if you wish to set up a new partition in this space and say yes and format it...after the format you can either leave it as a new partition for storage which is what I would do....or you can use a partitioning program to add the two partitions back together as one 'c' drive! In The Matters Of Style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, Stand Like A Rock "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

to Ed: Yes, the OS copied and is fully funtional on the hard drive. I think lurkswithin is saying that the program reset the c drive for me... to lurkswithin: sounds great... so I'll just set it as a primary partition. But, would you still recomend keeping it as a partition if I plan to get another new drive for backup and secondary storage? (I use a lot of images and sound files.) Also, does anyone know a safe and free partition management program? Safe is the top priority. Thanks for the quick response guys. I'm truly humbled by this whole site... Thank you.

one more thing to Ed: going from ATA on lod drive to SATA on new. So, I guess I didn't have to switch the master/slave pins.

I don't know of any freeware partition software. I used Partition Magic 7 (though ver. 8 is the latest) to partition/repartition my drives. You can even use it to intergrate the secondary partition back into C:/ drive. But be very carefull if you do this as any wrong move can ruin C:/ drive. But Disk Manager will allow you to partition the unallocated portion of the drive. You can format it as one logical drive or you can partition it down into smaller logical drives. But don't try to use it to reintergrate the space back into C:/ drive because you will have to delete the C:/ partition and lose all your data. Software gives me a headache.

by disabling the old drive in the bios it does not enter into the equation. Being disabled in the bios the OS would not see it and as such would not assign a drive letter to it. Usually with clone software you have a choice when reimaging the new drive to expand the image to use the entire disk. Either your free clone software didn't support this feature or you didn't engage it at the time of the reimage. Disk Manager will not allow you to do anything with the system/boot partition so no worries there. Ed newer bios's allow you to chose which drive you boot regardless of jumper settings on the drive. No need to rejumper to make a different drive c:. It is whatever drive boots becomes c:. Imagine the power if you knew how to internet search