harddrive HELP!!!

its a dell inspiron 640m... under my computer it has the capacity as 35gb.. thats exactly like the hard drive i cloned...

is there anyway i can just delete everything on my 100gb hard drive and start all over again like it was new

is there anyway i can delete the new drive using the usb enclosure...

ejn63,

I think that Acronis may have made an exact copy of the old hard drive, making a partition on my new hard drive that is the size of the old drive, leaving the remaining space unusable.  Is there anyway to fix this??  Im pretty sure thats what happend because the 100gb hard drive was being read correctly in the beginning

i checked in the F2 setup and its telling me its a 38gb harddrive... but when i cloned it in acronis it told me it was a 100gb hard drive... im thinking something went wrong when i cloned it because its the exact same size as the 40gb harddrive...everything is exactly the same... is there anyway i can delete everything on it and see if it possibly goes back to when i got it... this drive is brand new i had just purchased it...

I had the same thing happen to me with my E1505!  It's soooo frustrating.  I went from a 40gb toshiba (original HDD) to an 80gb Toshiba (from newegg.com).  Ran my Apricorn clone software via a sata->usb cable.  Popped in the new drive and bam! blue screen of death.  After that, no matter what I did, my new 80gb drive would only register as 35.XXX gb (exact size of the old drive)

 

I have since sent the drive back twice only to run into the same problem.  Toshiba said that the HDD was not compatible with my laptop.  Great.  Honestly I'm a little scared to upgrade even with a Dell-blessed HD.  But my main concern now is: have I completely fried the 80gb drive?  or is there a way to get back the missing space???  Even if I can't use it internally, I'd still like to have an extra 80 gb hard drive.

 

Any input would be appricated...  Vice versa- if I find out anything, I'll post it here.

 

Thanks.

i dont htink your hard drive is fried... i fixed my problem by just going to the manufactures website and i downloaded a cd that performs tests on your harddrive.  One of the options there was to completely erase it so i did that.  I tried cloning it with acronis but it gave me the same result so i had to go back and completely erase everything again... i ended up just doing a clean install of windows vista and everything worked fine.  Once i was able to boot up windows vista, i just transfered all the filed i needed from my old 40gb hard drive using the usb external shell.  I dont think your hard drive is fried. just go to the manufactures website and see if you can download the cd to erase the hard drive. you will have to boot from the cd in order to do this.  i didnt have a very good experience with acronis so i hope you can maybe just do a clean install like i did, and then just transfer files using the usb external shell. good luck!!

I have the same problem with my e1405. Original HD is 40gig (recognized as a 38gig in the bios) and bought a 100g (Seagate) that i was able to sucessfully clone using acronis software/hardware. Once I transfer the 100 gig hardware into the laptop, the harddrive is still recognized by the bios as a 38gig. New hard drive boots into windows but windows only sees 38gigs, and not 38gigs of a physical 100, but 38gigs total. I have downloaded Seagate Disc Wizard to sucessfully restore the 100gig back to factory status so i have no reason to believe the HD is faulty.

 

To confirm that it was not the acronis software/hardware, i ordered the OEM dell restore disks and tried loading the software onto the 100gig drive, but was still unsucessful. Windows still recognized 38gigs.

 

One thing seemed to stay constant through all this, and that is the bios is always reporting the same size, 38gigs. I've tried upgrading the bios to the latest version and i still don't have sucessful results.

 

Does anyone have any ideas on how to reset the bios so it recognizes the new HD size? Any additional help to all the folks here having problems is appreciated.