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I'm in the middle of a disaster recovery of a 250GB hard disk that was "clicking". Obviously I didn't have a backup copy.

I managed to salvage all the files thanks to GParted Live that was able to read the disk without a single "click" sound. So I cloned the partition to a new drive sized 500GB. Unfortunately, GParted process went to some kind of infinite loop, disks stopped I/O and after a couple of hours I interrupted the clone process I started.

Now the problem is: when cloning the partition I also chose to expand 250GB to the whole 500GB of the target disk. Windows sees the partition sized 500GB in computer management, but Windows Explorer only sees 250.

chkdsk e: /f says the filesystem is OK.

How can I repair the file system and let Windows see the full 500GB of the new partition?

An alternate idea is to deep-copy the files from the backup disk to a newly formatted disk. This should definitely fix. Any other ideas?

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  • @BroScience rephrased. Anyway I fixed by deep-copying. Keeping question open for sake of culture Dec 13, 2012 at 10:31

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You have expanded the partition but not the file system itself. You can use a Linux LiveCD that contains the ntfsresize utility to enlarge the file system to match the partition size:

If your partition is /dev/sda1 then use ntfsresize --verbose /dev/sda1.

Another option is to check whether Windows itself can expand the file system by right clicking on the partition in question in diskmgmt.msc and selecting Extend volume....

In my experience I found that sometimes it's not possible to do it from Windows but works fine with ntfsresize. So I'd advise you to try from within Windows first and then use a Linux LiveCD.

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