I hate, despise and berate Windows 10 disk management.

[Hayabusa Rider]

So I posted in the "Windows" sub if that's the place but I'm kinda ticked.

I have a 500 gig SSD for my C drive and cloned it onto a 1 T ssd. What I wound up with is a half gig partition table as "E", an "F" which is a clone and another unallocated partition of roughly equal size.

OK, I knew that was going to happen so I fire up Partition magic and try to combine the unallocated space with the cloned partition and the result showed as one partition. There was an "operation in progress" flag so I clicked and read that a system reboot was necessary. Did that and guess what? Nothing changed.

Screw me

 

[brianmanahan]

i gave up on windows cloning years ago and just went to clonezilla

 

[VirtualLarry]

Your problem doesn't sound like it exists with disk management, rather your cloning software of choice and settings (proportional clone is often NOT the default, though some of us feel that it should be).

Disk Management honestly hasn't changed since like NT 4.0, maybe before. Which might be a good thing, since most all of the bugs were wrung out of that "sacred code" long ago.

You want to do something "fancy" with partitions and filesystems? There's always Linux...

 

[Exterous]

When I did a clone of my drive in Win 10 the increased capacity just ended up as unallocated space and I was able to extend my C drive to consume it. Sounds like maybe the clone didn't go smoothly or something?

 

[pcgeek11]

When I did a clone of my drive in Win 10 the increased capacity just ended up as unallocated space and I was able to extend my C drive to consume it. Sounds like maybe the clone didn't go smoothly or something?

This.

Windows can grown the partition to fill the entire disk.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

So I posted in the "Windows" sub if that's the place but I'm kinda ticked.

I have a 500 gig SSD for my C drive and cloned it onto a 1 T ssd. What I wound up with is a half gig partition table as "E", an "F" which is a clone and another unallocated partition of roughly equal size.

OK, I knew that was going to happen so I fire up Partition magic and try to combine the unallocated space with the cloned partition and the result showed as one partition. There was an "operation in progress" flag so I clicked and read that a system reboot was necessary. Did that and guess what? Nothing changed.

Screw me

Delete E, F partitions, expand C to full?

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Delete E, F partitions, expand C to full?

I don't even know why those exist so I wasn't sure if I could do that. I'll have to disconnect the C drive (the original) and change the new ssd (A)

 

[ShookKnight]

I gave up on Windows and productivity on the home front. I just use it for gaming. All personal and productivity stuff is on my Mac.

Gaming on my Windows machine is a scorched Earth approach - all games & saves are on Steam, GOG, Battle.net. When something goes horribly wrong - reinstall / scrap everything. If the fix requires anything more than a 5 minute effort, chances are, things are fucked on Windows.

Label me impatient and/or inexperienced. But, I'm fed up with Windows' bipolar behavior.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

I don't even know why those exist so I wasn't sure if I could do that. I'll have to disconnect the C drive (the original) and change the new ssd (A)

They're likely clones of some of the 'mini partitions' that modern windows creates as part of normal operating system stuff... Part of this is probably an incorrect cloning process and those partitions *might* be needed, just not in the way they're currently built.

I might recommend doing this a different way, like re-cloning it with some other method, or maybe taking a full system backup (with windows backup) and restoring it onto the clone'd drive, which I assume would rebuild everything needed for normal windows operations.

You've got a fairly high chance of this creating an unusable windows volume, without doing some funky cmd prompt stuff from a recovery environment.

EDIT: To clarify, you generally get an EFI partition, and a recovery partition. The recovery partition isn't necessary (though it is handy), it just enables you to run a recovery environment without having the actual Win10 DVD in the event something goes wrong. The EFI partition is necessary for normal windows booting, and windows expects it to be there. EFI should be a half-gig partition, recovery around 10GB. Neither should have drive letters associated with them, and I'm not 100% sure if this is a strict requirement, but the EFI partition should come 'first' in the volumes. This is actually relevant for Windows.


If the drive clone software did in fact clone these correctly, you can just unassign the drive letters and use it as your normal boot volume. If it jacked up any of this you may want to look at re-cloning with different settings, or using a different clone software.

 

[DigDog]

device management in windows in in the stone age. i am .. WAS .. furious i cannot route the music playback to the PC speakers and the game sounds to the headset, when the PC has the capability to handle both at the same time. I've given up.
Tbh this can be said of just about every aspect of a PC today, there are so many QoL improvements which could be made and are nowhere to be seen, like modularity, easy automation, device control, and the absolutely INFURIATING fact that the more obscure an aspect of a PC function is, the less insformation is avalaible for it; have you noticed?

#Let's say, you go into the UI and want to change the wallpaper. Ok, TONS of blah blah blah about how to set your tiger.jpg for your monitor, but go into display proprieties and click on arandom TAB and you get explanations like "CMTF to dis_sub RUN:1" WHAT THE ****** DOES THAT MEAN MICROSOFT.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Windows sound now days is almost more messed up than Linux sound. They did something around Windows 7 era that made things really weird. On my work computer sometimes the volume says it's off with X over the speaker yet the sound still works, other times it's the opposite and the sound won't work. It sometimes goes to the internal speaker, other times it goes to the external speaker. It just does what it wants.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Still working on it. I deleted one partition which seemed redundant and nope it wasn't. Tomorrow I'll retry.

 

[BudAshes]

A lot of times there is an advanced option in cloning/restore software that lets you expand the space before/after a partition for a larger drive. This will then let you expand the C: partition larger for the cloning process.

 

[13Gigatons]

minitool partition wizard

 

[Fritzo]

I bought a physical drive clone device from NewEgg for like $25. Just pop the drives in, press a button, and 30 minutes later it's done. No partitions or crazy stuff to deal with.

 

[Scarpozzi]

The last time I tangled with it (cloning) and expansion, I was also trying to maintain my windows install and ultimately gave up. I found that it was much cleaner just to get Windows 10 on a USB stick and do a clean partition and install.

Things were easier before all that GPT bull... I was pretty awesome at navigating MBR stuff with a number of tools back in the day.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Windows does weird things now with all the system partitions, I don't know why they need so freaking many. I have noticed too that anything you try to do with them just trashes the whole install. Makes it hard if you want to setup dual boot off the same drive. I don't bother. I assume it can be done but I've never been successful. When I install Windows I just give it a dedicated drive and don't touch the partitions.

 

[13Gigatons]

Windows does weird things now with all the system partitions, I don't know why they need so freaking many. I have noticed too that anything you try to do with them just trashes the whole install. Makes it hard if you want to setup dual boot off the same drive.

The trick is to partition the drive before installing Windows. Once the partitions are preset Windows 10 won't make all those little partitions. (I presume those little partitions are extra protection against viruses so think twice)