formatted my drive wrong

[Krissybo]

Hello, I got a new SSD to replace my hard drive on my laptop, its has twice the storage, I cloned my stuff from my old hard drive to it not realizing it would change the SSD to only having the same storage amount as my hard drive( if I remember correctly the new SSD was 2tb while my hard drive was 500 mb, so now the SSD is only saying it has 500mb and is full basically), I still have the hard drive as well, but is there any way i can fix this so i can have more storage on my laptop? I dont know tech stuff well, my bf is the one who watches LTT but he works night shift so he doesn't have time to help me, any advice is appreciated

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, Krissybo said:

but is there any way i can fix this so i can have more storage on my laptop?

Yeah, it's not too hard to do, just out of the way. On the system with the new drive booted up, open up Disk Management (search for it in the Windows search bar, it should come up as "Create and format hard disk partitions") and look for your SSD. It should have show up as having a main partition and a bunch of unallocated space. You should just need to right click the main partition, hit "Extend Partition," and follow the wizard to use all the available storage to extend through all the unallocated space, though sometimes this option is grayed out and you need to go about this some other way (send a screenshot of the partition layout if it is as that can indicate what you need to do). 

[Krissybo]

i tried right clicking on what i thought was the main partition but nothing is showing up so here is a screenshot like you asked

 

[Krissybo]

30 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Yeah, it's not too hard to do, just out of the way. On the system with the new drive booted up, open up Disk Management (search for it in the Windows search bar, it should come up as "Create and format hard disk partitions") and look for your SSD. It should have show up as having a main partition and a bunch of unallocated space. You should just need to right click the main partition, hit "Extend Partition," and follow the wizard to use all the available storage to extend through all the unallocated space, though sometimes this option is grayed out and you need to go about this some other way (send a screenshot of the partition layout if it is as that can indicate what you need to do). 

my bad, meant to quote you on my last post

[RONOTHAN##]

11 minutes ago, Krissybo said:

i tried right clicking on what i thought was the main partition but nothing is showing up so here is a screenshot like you asked

 

OK, so the issue is the recovery partitions. The main limitation of Disk Management is that it can only extend partitions linearly, so if you have a partition in the way like those two recovery partitions are you cannot extend the partition. There does exist some third party software that can do this (unfortunately I don't know this off the top of my head, so I can't help you there if you want to go this route), though the main way I've fixed this in the past is to just delete these partitions from the command line. 

 

Open up a command prompt window (type CMD into the search bar) and run the command diskpart. It will ask if you want to run as administrator, then open up a new window. Run "sel disk 0" to select the main disk, then type "list part" to see all the partitions. Find those two partitions (it will be the 721MB one and the 25GB one) and note down the partition number of one of them. Run "sel part #", replacing the # with the appropriate partition number (probably 4 or 5, but double check before doing that). Finally, run the command "del part override" to delete this partition. Repeat for the other partition. Afterwards, you can go back to Disk Management and be able to extend the partition through the GUI. 

 

As for what you're deleting, these are mainly there in case something goes wrong with your Windows install, this is there so that you can use built in recovery tools so you don't need to use something else to fix it. That said, you can always make a Windows installation USB, and that will have all the tools to fix a Windows install if necessary, so I don't find it all that big a deal to not have the recovery partition and would rather have that extra bit of space and therefore don't bother to remake it (from what I know there is a way to do so if you want to know). 

[Krissybo]

22 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

OK, so the issue is the recovery partitions. The main limitation of Disk Management is that it can only extend partitions linearly, so if you have a partition in the way like those two recovery partitions are you cannot extend the partition. There does exist some third party software that can do this (unfortunately I don't know this off the top of my head, so I can't help you there if you want to go this route), though the main way I've fixed this in the past is to just delete these partitions from the command line. 

 

Open up a command prompt window (type CMD into the search bar) and run the command diskpart. It will ask if you want to run as administrator, then open up a new window. Run "sel disk 0" to select the main disk, then type "list part" to see all the partitions. Find those two partitions (it will be the 721MB one and the 25GB one) and note down the partition number of one of them. Run "sel part #", replacing the # with the appropriate partition number (probably 4 or 5, but double check before doing that). Finally, run the command "del part override" to delete this partition. Repeat for the other partition. Afterwards, you can go back to Disk Management and be able to extend the partition through the GUI. 

 

As for what you're deleting, these are mainly there in case something goes wrong with your Windows install, this is there so that you can use built in recovery tools so you don't need to use something else to fix it. That said, you can always make a Windows installation USB, and that will have all the tools to fix a Windows install if necessary, so I don't find it all that big a deal to not have the recovery partition and would rather have that extra bit of space and therefore don't bother to remake it (from what I know there is a way to do so if you want to know). 

Thank you so much, I have it fixed now, hope you a great night!