Laptop HDD help please – one for the geeks

OK, I have replaced the HDD on my laptop, cloning the old 640GB HDD with a 240GB SSD. It is working fine now from the new SSD, very quick and very quiet!

The only snag is that I don’t have as much space available as I expected. There seems to be a ‘rogue’ partition on the new drive, not doing anything but taking up space. I’m pretty sure that this wasn’t on the original HDD, so at some point during the clone I think it is created a partition twice.

I’m know nothing of HDDs, formatting and such like, but my searches on the interweb have made me pretty sure that this is NOT down to the unallocated new space in the drive as the new drive I actually smaller than the one it replaced.

Can someone please offer me some advice on how to identify the rogue partition, remove it and ensure that the resulting space is available to the C drive?

The screen shot attached is from the EaseUS Partition programme.

I’m guessing at least one of the Partitions is redundant. But I don’t know which, and I could then do with some guidance on how to (safely) get rid of it and allocate the released space back to the C drive.

Can anyone help?

What partitions did you have on the previous drive?

TBH it looks like you have several partitions too many there – or some partitions are too large, because it’s quite common to have a hidden System partition at the start of the disk, but it’s usually a lot smaller than that. The concerning thing here is that none of those partitions are empty, which makes me wary of advising you to delete (or even resize) them over the internet.

Unfortunately it’s often a tricky thing cloning a disk to a smaller one.

Take a screenshot in Disk Manager would you?

Thanks for the prompt reply!

I should have said that prior to cloning, I had done a clean Windows 10 install, so the system was working quite happily from, I think, about 40GB in total.

The partitions should be empty as there is nothing on the laptop other than Windows, Office and a few other apps – nothing that can’t be recovered.

I am aware that Windows creates a recovery partition, so that I can live with. And presumably there are some system files that are also partitioned off (if that’s the right term) that I can’t avoid.

If anyone can suggest which to get rid of, it would be appreciated. Otherwise, should I just do another clean install of Win 10?

Cougar – any more info?

A bit cryptic for me.

That’s what I’d advise in the circumstances, though if you’ve got nothing much on there it won’t harm to try other things (which might lead to you needing to do the full re-install anyway).

You don’t NEED the recovery partition if you want to free up the space – assuming you create backups, but then the recovery partition won’t necessarily save you if you don’t.

I’m not sure what information Disk Manager will provide that we don’t already have BTW – the only reason I ever use that is because it’s already installed, if I need to do one of the simple things it can cope with.

Oh and looking in Disk Manager on mine, I have a 100MB System partition at the start – IIRC when I did a clean W10 install it created a 500MB one, but it shouldn’t be anywhere near that big. I’m thinking you either did something funny when installing or the cloning has done something funny and even more sure about above advice to start again.

Many thanks aracer.

Cougar – not with you sorry.

I’m not sure what information Disk Manager will provide that we don’t already have BTW

I was curious as to what it was recognising.

If anyone can suggest which to get rid of, it would be appreciated. Otherwise, should I just do another clean install of Win 10?

TBH, given you’ve already done a clean install (assuming you actually have), I’d blow the lot away and start again. I’m confused as to why you cloned it in the first place.

Use a free tool to merge the partitions, back up first.

Cougar, it was a pretty straight forward reason for cloning in that it minimised risk.

I’m no expert, but such was the consistency of advice on the web and straight up logic of using a known software setup when installing a new disk, I was sold.

Otherwise, you have a new disk and a new set up. Using the Al Murray ‘stands to reason’ logic, you have twice the chance of a problem, something I was keen to avoid.

I think I’ve done a clean install of Windows 10 as I used the Windows 10 media creation tool, but this wasn’t without its problems. It crashed during the reinstall and needed some TLC to complete, so I wanted to minimise risk as far as possible when I put the new disk in on top.

Re the disk manager thing, what else could it recognise?

It’s more a case of what it wouldn’t recognise – I presume he was thinking some of those paritions might not show up. Though IME it recognises the existence even of things like Ext4 (Linux) partitions even if not correctly identifying them.

In the circumstances I’d suggest the advice you were relying on is incorrect – it might minimise risk by reducing the number of new things, but that’s more than outweighed by aggravation of cloning onto a smaller device. Though I’m wondering whether the funny partitions are down to your crash. Can I just check – it crashed when you were doing the install rather than creating the media? There shouldn’t be any issues with media creation tool, but I’ve not used it myself (I downloaded on a Linux machine – you can do a vanilla download of the iso that way without being forced to install a special bit of software).

aracer – yes it fell over during the clean (re-)install of Windows 10. It got stuck in a reboot loop during the process. I had to re-start and reapply the software a second time.

It did eventually finish successfully and it was at this point I cloned the HDD onto the new SSD.

Your comment has just made me realise that perhaps that partition on the disk was a result of the (re-)install failure…

I’m going to try again from scratch and hope that fixes it for good.

My bargain SSD is looking less and less good value as I spend more time on this old machine!

Many thanks for all the help.

does the old HDD work and does it still have the data on?

If so then get a USB drive caddy, check the data on the old drive is still there and do a fresh install on the SSD.

Yeah, it’s all still there, sitting in a caddy as I type.

I’ll take the advice and do the re-install in the morning.

Thanks all.