As a user of Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 7, have you ever found you cannot use full capacity of your HDD after cloning to larger HDD. For instance, your present HDD is 320GB, after you cloning it to 500 GB HDD, your Windows only allows you to use 320GD of the HDD. Does hard drive show wrong capacity or something wrong happens when you clone disk?

May be there are a few reasons causing the problem, but the main reason is that clone only copies the size of the original hard drive and Windows regard the rest space as unavailable. So you can only use the space as large as your previous HDD no matter how large your new HDD is.

How to Use Full Capacity after Cloning?

When you meet the problem, how can you solve it? Is there a way? Of course, there is a method for you. Right click My Computer>Manage>Disk Management, you will see there is unallocated space on hard drive (black area), you can add it to partition or create a new partition with it. However, if you want to add unallocated space into partition with Disk Management, you must know the unallocated space can be only added into the partition which is in front of it, or the Extend Volume button will be grayed out.

disk-management

If you want to add it to other partitions, you can use free software-AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. With this software, you can merge unallocated space into any partition without losing any data.

Step1: Download AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, install, and launch it. Right click the partition you want add unallocated space (eg.partition C) and click “Merge Partitions”.

merge-partition

Step2: Select unallocated space and then click “OK”.

choose-unallocated-space

Step3: In the pop-up window, you will see the unallocated space has been added into partition C. to perform the operation, click “Apply”.

operatetion

This software has much useful features. For example, this software can help you clone disk from one HDD to a larger HDD without losing capacity. In this way, there is no need to spend time merging partition or creating partition. May be it is a better way for you. The detail steps will be showed as following.

Step1: Launch this software, choose Disk Copy Wizard on the left bar and then select “Copy Disk Quickly”.

copy-disk-quickly

Step2: Choose the destination disk to store source disk, make sure the unallocated space on destination disk is larger or equal to source disk and then click “Next”.

choose-destination-disk

Step3: In the pop-up window, you are allowed to resize the partition size on the destination disk. There are three options for you: “Copy without resizing partition” means keeping the size of source partitions, “Fit partition to entire disk” means the program automatically adjusts the size of partition to fit the entire disk and “Edit partition on this disk” means resizing partition size on the disk by you. You can choose one depending on your requirement. After finishing the adjustment, please click “Next”

edit-disk

Step3: After confirming all the settings, clicks “apply” to perform the operations.

click-apply

Note:

  • If the hard disk you want to clone contains system boot partition, the operation will be completed under the “PreOS Mode”.
  • If there are partitions on the destination disk, they will be deleted. Therefore, if these data are useful for you, please make a backup of them with AOMEI Backupper.