Question HDD only showing about 230 GB instead of 3TB after using docking station to xfer from old to new drive

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

I purchased a Lenovo desktop PC with monitor at a local thrift store for $150 a couple of weeks back. It is a core I5 based system, and a nice upgrade to our old system. However, the hard drive was on the small side, and I didn't really want to trust our data to a 7 year old HDD, so I ordered a 3TB Seagate Barracuda drive for $70.

For Christmas, I also bought myself a Wavlink dual bay docking station. I've always wanted one of those, to make it easy to back things up to SATA hard drives, and possibly to merge existing setups to bigger hard drives. I must say that I'm rather disappointed with the lack of much of any documentation in the box. However, yesterday without it hooked up to the PC, it seemed to be xferring the data without a hitch.

When I put the new drive in the system, it booted up nicely, so I figured everything worked well. However, later on I noticed that the hard drive is showing up as having only about 230 GB of space instead of the nearly 3TB that I expected. It appears that using the Wavlink docking station to transfer the OS somehow made the new drive appear to Windows 10 as if it has less than 10% of the space that is expected.

What is the best way to rectify this? Do I need to physically swap out the hard drives, do a backup of the OS to external drive, then reinstall the new drive, format it, and restore from the backup?
Or is there some way to resize the partition to make use of the full space available on the new hard drive?

Thanks for any suggestions!

 

[Exterous]

While I'm not familiar with Wavlink its possible it cloned everything over including your hard drive partition size. If you go into Disk Management you can likely right click on the C drive and select "Extend Volume" to add in the rest of the HDD space. It's also possible you will need to go to the bottom half of the Disk Management screen, select the "Unformatted" section of the disk (likely labeled as Disk 0) and format it before Windows will let you extend your volume

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

Thanks so much! Using the Disk Management screen (and Gparted, which it turns out I had on a CD), I was able to get Windows 10 to see 2 TB of space instead of just 230 GB. I still have a partition of 100GB, and another of about 600GB. I'm thinking I might install Windows 98 or XP to the 100GB partition, and perhaps Ubuntu or some other flavor of Linux to the 600 GB one. However, I would need to figure out some sort of good boot manager that would make it simple to just use the keyboard to pick between these on bootup. I've never done that before, so I think I'll take my time and read up on it first. Thanks again!

 

[Exterous]

Glad it helped!

 

[DavidRLewis]

Just a note. For a 3TB drive to work as a 3TB it needs to be formatted as GPT. This is a newer file structure than NTFS, which has been common for many years since the the WINNT, WIN2000 days. DOS used FAT 16, 98 used FAT32, and for most users NTFS has been the standard for the last decade or so with XP and WIN7.
FAT16 used to require 2 GB partition sizes, and the size of the drive would depend on BIOS support, 2GB, 8GG, 20GB and then finally 127GB all were hurdles, based on the number of bits used for addressing supported by the OS and the BIOS together.
Back to your 3TB. GPT is supported in WIN7(with latest patches) and WIN10 as a secondary drive very easily. For it to be your boot drive however, not only does the drive need to be formatted in GPT, but you have to have a UEFI bios and your OS needs and BIOS need to be configured to UEFI mode. On an older system this is possibly not supported. so your drive may only be usable to the 2TB limitation with the remaining 1TB unusable.Docks and enclosures may or may not recognize the drives full capacity once formatted in GPT.