You'd think a drive maker's own diagnostics would know that 58 GB is less than 320 GB (CD, hard drive)

[EscapeCalifornia]

I cloned a 60 GB drive onto a 320 GB drive tonight. I did an as-is clone which left free space after the 3 GB restore partition. So the next step was to move that 3 GB partition to the end of the drive and enlarge the C drive to fill the gap. I've done this a thousand times.

All was well until I went to move the 3 GB partition and got a useless error message. I rebooted to attempt a different method and found the drive now shows it's only 58 GB total. Three different PCs and various utilities all show it as 58 GB. The kicker is that the manufacturer's own diagnostic program shows it to be a properly functioning 58 GB drive. Gee, you'd think maybe they'd write it to compare the model number (which contains the capacity) to the reported size. I hate getting defective parts.

[Charles]

Originally Posted by EscapeCalifornia

I cloned a 60 GB drive onto a 320 GB drive tonight. I did an as-is clone which left free space after the 3 GB restore partition. So the next step was to move that 3 GB partition to the end of the drive and enlarge the C drive to fill the gap. I've done this a thousand times.

All was well until I went to move the 3 GB partition and got a useless error message. I rebooted to attempt a different method and found the drive now shows it's only 58 GB total. Three different PCs and various utilities all show it as 58 GB. The kicker is that the manufacturer's own diagnostic program shows it to be a properly functioning 58 GB drive. Gee, you'd think maybe they'd write it to compare the model number (which contains the capacity) to the reported size. I hate getting defective parts.

Remember something like that happened to me a few months ago? Not sure if it is as you wrote or if my hard drive truly was a 500G that somehow got damaged and was only formatable to whatever 36 gigs or whatever I wrote.

[TurcoLoco]

If the drive is indeed 320GB then the formatting must have messed up the mbr or something but the vendor's own utilities should have offered a remedy for it, perhaps a low-level format?

Curious, what brand was it? Also what type of disk imaging utility were you using?

[EscapeCalifornia]

Seagate 2.5" SATA drive. I used Acronis Disk Director which has a cloning feature. I've used it many times before without problems and don't see how it could make the drive report the wrong size in the BIOS.

[TurcoLoco]

Originally Posted by EscapeCalifornia

Seagate 2.5" SATA drive. I used Acronis Disk Director which has a cloning feature. I've used it many times before without problems and don't see how it could make the drive report the wrong size in the BIOS.

BIOS actually shows the size of the drive? Interesting. Anyhow, I do not know what caused this as I personally never seen or experienced this.
I doubt you could even replicate it yourself? My educated guess suggest it was either the drive itself or the imaging program but it really doesn't matter.
I would try low-level formatting or even better the freely available drive utilities from disk vendor's (Seagate) web site. I know a friend had the same issue a few years back and he used the bootable CD that came with the drive (same stuff available for free at the manufacturer's site which I am sure you knew already) and ran the formatting tool to resolve the issue.

One other alternative would be to use a bootable Linux CD, Ultimate Boot CD or some other bootable CD that has bunch of related tools to do the job.
If all fails, the drive might be faulty.

[EscapeCalifornia]

Yeah the BIOS showed the incorrect, smaller, size. It booted up and seemed to work fine and you'd never know there was a problem if you didn't look at the model number and size on the physical label.

I didn't want to screw with it so I RMAed it to Newegg. The replacement seems to be working fine at the stated capacity now.