can't extend volume partition for new drive

[HTM~FooFoo(Ack!)]

I just cloned my SSD because it was failing, and everything works great on the new one. However, it's only showing 111gig available from a 240gig drive. Checked under drive management and it shows 350mb for system reserve, 450mb for recovery partition and an unallocated space of 111gb. Under the drop down menu for the main C partition, the option to extend the volume is greyed out. I marked this partition as active but still greyed out. No option to extend the unalloc space..only for new simple volume. DO i need to assign it a drive letter first and then try to merge them? On such a small drive, I'd like to have all available space for page file and such...all media is stored on a second drive so no worries there.

[HTM~Cousin_Itt]

Brand, OS and what did you clone with?

[HTM~FooFoo(Ack!)]

I cloned to a PNY from a Mushkin SSD, using EaseUS TODO Backup utility...running Win10 64. I went ahead and formatted to NTFS and assigned a drive letter...thinking that once that was done, Win10 might recognize the compatible space and allow me to merge...still greyed out...everything works perfectly though...the clone process took all of about 15 minutes...rebooted with old SSD still connected so it could negotiate some settings, shut down, removed old drive, rebooted and works perfectly. I do have it partitioned so no wasted space at least.

[HTM~Bluesman]

I've had mixed success with cloning drives. In the end I usually end up just doing a clean install and reinstalling my programs. Nice having that new Windows smell again!

[HTM~Cousin_Itt]

I have used Partition Magic many times to adjust a partition on a hard drive even when its the OS. I have an old copy I think ver 6 I have used in both a win7 and win8 environment without issue.

[HTM~FooFoo(Ack!)]

I think I may have an older copy of that around here...didn't think of that.

[HTM~Cousin_Itt]

Life is best ran by the K.I.S.S. method there son...just sayin

[HTM~Batman]

Unfortunately, a lot of cloning software doesn't allow you to clone and use the entire, larger drives, space. And you can't do it with windows as it has to be a dynamic partition.

I keep an old seagate hard drive lying around specifically for this reason. If you use Seatools, which is a crippled version of Acronis, it will allow you to clone two other drives and expand the smaller partition on the larger drive so you don't end up with this empty space. It recognizes RAID arrays and they keep it updated for the latest OS compatibility.

[Born]

There is usually a setting in the cloning software to duplicate size, or partition as ratio (use the whole drive in equal percents to the old one). as to resizing after, in Windows 7, it will allow you to extend a basic partition out, (extra space must be AFTER the partition to extend, not before it). It will allow a dynamic partition to be extended either way. If your original partition was dynamic, the software may have only been able to dup it as is.

Now, that said, a word about SSD's - I have gone through 4 ssd's lately and found that the new 3-D or tri-layer SSD's SUCK. They have issues with being filled up and can permanently lose performance. Based on the my experience and the reading I have done, the manufactures have got too may control / tuning algorithms going and they need extra space (bad clusters, caching etc...) so don't fully partition the drive, go maybe 85% (210 on a 240) and then NEVER fill the SSD - even once - it can reduce the performance by 40-70% only fill up to 70% of a partition. I have personally seen this effect with SSD's losing performance.

Also, NEVER delete a partition on an ssd with out actually deleting the data off the partition first, then allowing TRIM to do its work. This can take hours, even a day. I have repartitioned TRIM enabled SSD's without deleting, and had the data fully coverable after multiple partitions and reformats (not overwrites) weeks later, so the supposed "housekeeping" that new ssd's do is very questionable. All my MCL - 2 layer SSD's (3-4 years old) are still running, it's only the newer ones that seem to suffer these issues. I've had Samsung and Crucial do this.

[HTM~FooFoo(Ack!)]

I got it taken care of. Thanks for the help. However, whatever the cloning did, it corrupted the BOOTCFG.exe file so that brand new drive is gonna have to be reformated and then recloned...PITA