How to Solve Missing Lots of Hard Drive Space After Cloning

Why missing lots of hard drive space after cloning?

Imagine this: you just cloned your hard drive, expecting everything to be perfectly copied, but suddenly, you notice that a large chunk of your storage is missing. Frustrating, right? Don’t worry — you’re not alone.

So, why do you end up missing lots of hard drive space after cloning? The main issue is that the cloned drive’s partitions may not be correctly resized, leaving unallocated or hidden space that doesn’t appear in File Explorer. The result? A significant portion of your drive becomes unusable.

Here are some common causes of missing space after cloning:

1. Incorrect partition cloning: If the cloning process did not accurately replicate the partition structure, you may lose space.

2. Unallocated space on the drive: When the cloned partitions don’t use the full capacity of the target drive, unallocated space is left.

3. Hidden partitions and reserved space: Some drives contain hidden partitions reserved for system recovery or manufacturer tools.

4. System recovery partitions taking extra space: These partitions can be larger than expected, especially on drives with factory-installed operating systems.

Many users encounter this issue after cloning a drive, and the good news is that it can be fixed. This guide will walk you through the problem and provide practical solutions to recover your missing hard drive space.

How to find back missing hard drive space after cloning

Based on the possible causes mentioned, you can try the following methods to see if the missing space can be restored, allowing you to regain full disk capacity.

Method 1. Recover missing hard drive space directly

AOMEI Partition Assistant is a versatile and user-friendly disk management tool designed to help users effectively manage their hard drives. Whether you are dealing with missing hard drive space, unallocated partitions, or lost storage capacity, AOMEI Partition Assistant provides a reliable solution.

With its intuitive interface and powerful features called “Partition Recovery”, users can quickly recover missing hard drive space without the need for complex technical knowledge. This tool supports all versions of Windows 11/10/8/7, making it an essential utility for optimizing disk usage and ensuring maximum storage efficiency.

Step 1. Install and open AOMEI Partition Assistant. Go to Recover > Partition Recovery on the main interface. When you get into the partition recovery wizard, select a disk that you want to recover. Click Next.

Step 2. Select Fast Search. It is recommended that you select this option the first time as it is faster than Full Search. If you are unable to recover the lost partition using Fast Search then I recommend you try the Full Search option.

Step 3. Select the lost partition and click Proceed.

Step 4. Click Finish to exit this window after you see the congratulations message.

Method 2. Unhide partition

When installing Windows on a new hard drive, the system automatically creates hidden partitions, such as the OEM partition, recovery partition, and Microsoft reserved partition. These partitions are invisible in File Explorer because they lack drive letters, but they can be viewed in Disk Management.

Step 1. To access these hidden partitions, open Disk Management, right-click the partition without a drive letter, and choose "Change Drive Letter and Paths".

Step 2. Follow the on-screen instructions to assign a drive letter, making the partition accessible.

Method 3. Disable System Protection on C drive

While System Protection helps save information about your system files and settings, it can consume significant disk space, potentially causing storage issues. Disabling this feature can free up the occupied space.

Step 1. Right-click "This PC" or "My Computer" and choose "Properties".

Step 2. Click "System Protection" and then "Configure".

Step 3. Select "Disable system protection" and click "Apply".

Method 4. Disable Hibernation

When your computer enters Hibernation Mode, the operating system generates a hidden file called the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys). This file typically takes up half of your system's RAM capacity.

To recover the space occupied by this hidden file, you can disable hibernation:

Step 1. Press Win + R, type "cmd", and press Enter.

Step 2. In the Command Prompt window, type "powercfg.exe /hibernate off" and press Enter.

Method 5. Recover missing hard drive space from unallocated space

Unallocated space is another common reason for missing disk capacity. For example, after cloning a 500GB HDD to a 1TB SSD, you may find that only 500GB is visible in Windows Explorer. This happens because, with a sector-by-sector clone, the remaining 500GB becomes unallocated space, making it invisible in Explorer.

To recover this missing space, you can create a new partition using Disk Management:

Step 1. Right-click the unallocated space and choose "New Simple Volume".

Step 2. Complete the setup to create a new partition.

Alternatively, you can right-click the partition before the unallocated space and select “Extend Volume” to extend the partition to this space.

Alternative way to clone a hard drive without losing drive space

Some users have reported losing hard drive space after cloning, even when using cloning software. To avoid this issue, consider using a more reliable alternative.

We highly recommend AOMEI Partition Assistant, a versatile third-party partition manager. This tool can efficiently clone an entire hard drive to a larger SSD or HDD without losing any data. Beyond cloning, it offers a wide range of features, including:

◆ Checking and fixing file system errors.
◆ Rebuilding the Master Boot Record (MBR).
◆ Migrating the Windows operating system.
◆ Converting FAT32 to NTFS and vice versa.

AOMEI Partition Assistant is a comprehensive solution for disk management and data protection.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "Clone" in the main interface and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the destination disk to store the data on the source disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to “Sector to Sector clone”, and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive.

Step 5. At last, click "Apply" and "Proceed" in the main interface to start cloning the hard drive.

Conclusion

In summary, you now know how to resolve the issue of missing hard drive space after cloning. You have also discovered the best disk cloning software to simplify the cloning process. If your drive space disappears after cloning, try these solutions to recover it.