I've never seen this before: After cloning, I have a single partition which fills the drive, but NTFS only reports a size significantly smaller than the partition.

I had a 1.5TB HDD. I copied its sole NTFS partition to a 2TB drive's partition via RoadKil's RawCopy (v 1.2)—I did a partition copy, not a drive copy. The result was that Windows 8.1's Disk Management reports the partition having a size of 1.9TB... BUT, checking the D: drive's capacity shows it to be 1.4TB, exactly the same as the size of the original 1.5TB drive (free space is relative to the 1.4TB size). There appears to be an inconsistency between the partition size and the NTFS formatted size (Disk Management does not show any free space after the partition). I even booted Linux to run gparted and it simply reports the 1.9TB partition size. I'm missing ~500GB of usable space somewhere.

I do not know enough about the bookkeeping of NTFS, but I infer that it maintains its own "size" (independent of what the partition reports). So, I thought I could use the Disk Management utility shrink the partition, thinking that it'd coordinate the new size with what NTFS thinks. But when I tried to do this, I get a brief popup "Invalid parameter" and it refuses to shrink the partition.

Can anyone describe what is going on here? Is there anyway to "fix" my situation and regain use of the "missing" 500GB? I should be able to copy the data (using a utility other than RawCopy... perhaps Acronis?) to a separate drive, reformat the desired drive, then copy the data back, but this will take a long time and I do not want to end up in the same situation. (Which copy/clone utility should I use which will respect the size of the target drive?).

I believe I can use a file-copy utility (rather than partition clone), after formatting, but I fear that it will not preserve all the ownership and permission variations across all the files, so I used the cloning utility RawCopy (I'm going to test TeraCopy).

I would use a disc editor (eg DMDE freeware) in readonly mode to examine the drive.

Can you show us DMDE's Partitions window?

http://dmde.com/

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Thanks, fzabkar, I'll try that and post back here, but I will say that I did use a partition table viewer and calculate the sector count to match the 1.9TB that Disk Management reports.

It sounds to me that you have may have reserved a partition size of 1.9TiB (?) in your partition table, but you have then cloned a 1.4TiB NTFS volume into this partition. The first sector of the volume is the NTFS boot sector. It will report a size of 1.4TiB.

If the above scenario matches your own, then the solution would be to adjust the partition table parameters to match those in the boot sector. That only requires a few mouse-clicks with DMDE.

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

I think you are dead on, fzabkar! So I should set the End LBA of the primary partition from 39070226943 to match that of its contained volume's End LBA 2930276344?

I am confused by "$Volume 02". It looks like it starts at 500GB and runs to the end of the primary partition. I am thinking that this volume should not exist. What do I do with it?

DMDE has found your new NTFS volume ("2TB Bill") and an old 1.5TB volume "$Volume 02".

The "Ind." column shows the indicators for each partition.

E = partition exists in partition table
B = partition has a Boot sector. This is the first sector of the partition.
C = partition has a Copy of the boot sector. This is at the end of the NTFS volume.
F = partition has a recognisable File system.

The first part of "$Volume 02" has been overwritten by the cloning process. Therefore only the boot sector Copy remains. This is normal.

One way to recover the missing 500GB capacity is , as you say, to edit the partition size in the partition table in sector 0. We can do this by editing the actual number.

Go to LBA 0 and select Mode -> Partition Table MBR/GPT

Edit -> Edit Mode

Your earlier Partitions screenshot is telling us that the 1.5TB volume starts at sector 2048 and ends at sector 2930276344.

You now need to change the "Number of Sectors" to 2930274297 (= 2930276344 - 2048 + 1).

Select Drive -> Apply Changes

Reboot so that Windows can reexamine the drive.

Alternatively ...

Bring up the Partitions window.

Edit -> Edit Mode

R-click the first "2TB Bill Pri." partition and select Remove the Partition.

Now r-click the second "2TB Bill" partition and select Insert the Partition (Undelete).

Select Drive -> Apply Changes

Reboot

_________________
A backup a day keeps DR away.

Interesting. I took a peek at my C: volume's configuration and it looks simpler than my messed up drive. There are no sub-partitions. Is the sub-volume entry on my bad drive, which is the same as the partition description, a result of the problem I'm having or is its structure actually different?

Whoops, I guess we were posting at the same time. I'm reading your last post, now.

OMG! fzabkar, thank you, thank you, thank you! You saved me days of cloning and copying! I feel so ignorant... I used to know partitioning and formatting, in the DOS days, but I have not kept up with (or have forgotten) the details of the evolution of this stuff. I chose your second approach, feeling I would be less error-prone, but the first probably would have forced me to understand what was going on, better.

Thank you very much for taking the time to help me and shed some light on this for me.