Przemysław Łukawski's blog

Sometimes you must restore you partition images made by programs like SelfImage to a greater partitions – for example after buying new greater hard drive and setting the partitions’ sizes to greater values as they were in original drive.

The problem with such operation is that after restoring for example 20GB partition image to a partition which has 40GB, you will see, that the file system says that there is only 20GB of total partition’s space. This is caused due to old partition size information saved inside internal filesystem’s structures, which was made during the format of the partition on the original drive. Fortunately, the DISKPART utility built in Windows XP and newer systems can fix that problem. To do that follow the following steps after you restore the image to the new, reater partition:

1. Launch the diskpart command line utility.
2. Execute “select volume <number>” command, where “<number>” is a number of the volume containing the restored partition image (the list of all volumes and their numbers can be retrieved by executing “list volume” command).
3. Execute “extend filesystem” command.
4. And this is all – now exit the diskpart utility by executing “exit” command and the system will correctly see the real partition size.

Thanks to this tip you can use programs like SelfImage not only for making backups but also for moving entire partitions (including system partitions) to other hard drives even, when they size do not match.

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