Unable to format unallocated disk space

Question

I swapped out my hard drive to an SSD and cloned the drive. The initial drive was 500Gb and the new SSD has 1Tb capacity.Everything went well, however I cannot format 500Gb of un allocated space. I receive  the following error message. How can I format unallocated space and format same. 

Many thanks in advance

Answer 1

Hi Damien. I"m Greg, an installation specialist, 9 year Windows MVP and Independent Advisor, here to help you.

THere are multiple problems with your disk junkyard. For one it's converted to a Dynamic Disk which is only meant to span a partition across multiple hard drives. Windows cannot operate for long on a Dynamic Disk, and most conversion methods require wiping the drive, so to convert non-destructively see Option 1 in this tutorial: https://filestore.community.support.microsoft.c...

Next, the Unallocated Space is empty space. You can use the same partitioning tool Partition Wizard to extend the data or C partition into the Unallocated Space since it is also the only one that can annex space from non-adjacent partitions and Unallocated Space: http://partitionwizard.com/video-help/extend_pa...

Note that these are Seven Forums tutorials because the features to do this for free haven't been in PW for years, but Shawn preserved a download so you can still use the older free version to do these things.

If I were you I'd do the cloning over using the best free Tool Macrium and include only the System, C and Data partiitons. With Macrium you'd drag those to the new drive, a link appears named Drive Tools that lets you resize the partitions on the fly to make them fit like you want, before completing the cloning. See these guides:

http://www.ghacks.net/2015/08/29/the-best-way-t...

http://knowledgebase.macrium.com/display/KNOW/C...

But if you want you can fix what you have by converting Dynamic to Basic (which Macrium would never allow), then use Extend function to redistribute the space from Unallocated space to C and Data partitions.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask back any questions and keep me posted. If you'll wait to rate whether my post helped you, I will keep working with you until it's resolved.

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