Is there a way to regain missing memory on my WD external hard drives

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for Windows
1

I have a big problem with two of my WD external hard drives. One is a WD 2TB My Passport Ultra Metal Gold [Recertified]. The other I just purchased and received today. It is a WD 1TB My Passport.

The problem is this:
I was trying to clone my 500GB HDD on my laptop to the new 1TB My Passport, and I got a bad readout. Not that I know much of anything really, but I have cloned computer hard drives a couple of time before, and they always ‘clone’ exactly the same. Every ‘partition’ always matches identically. Well, when I ran this clone, using Macrium Reflect, which I always use; the 4th partition, that is the main partition C:, read differently. About 10 or 12 GB difference, not exactly, but just a strange difference.

This bothered me, so I decided to run the clone again. I did not format the new WD external drive that I was cloning to, but just started the clone, choosing that drive as my source destination. The usual popup message saying the usual “The drive would be formatted” then the “Continue” prompt appeared, which I did. Well, the clone took no time at all and was done it about 5 minutes. It didn’t really help much, there was still a difference. Don’t know if it was exactly the same difference.

Not to go on and on, but I tried the clone again. This time I only chose the 4th partition, C:, on my laptop’s drive, and since there was not the possibility to choose just the 4th partition on my source drive, the new WD drive, I just left it as usual, the entire drive selected, sounds pretty stupid now, didn’t realize it would be such a disaster. This clone did not work either.

I guess if I would have noticed, the drives were probably messed up before I ever did this, the second repeat of the clone. But I did not notice, and therefore I did not realize at all that the formatting part of the clone process must have been eliminating memory from my new WD drive.

My new WD 1TB drive now has a total of 444GB total capacity.

But that is not all. I had, just by chance. a WD 2TB external hard drive connected at the time this clone was being done. I have no idea how it was effected, but it now has a total capacity of 930GB.

Is this a complete blunder or can it be remedied?

2

Hi,

I don’t have any experience using clone. I don’t think the WD backup drives are intended for this. For one thing they always encript (?) the files. Have you tried using WD Backup? If not, I suggest you download it and set it up for you desired files. It won’t backup everything. There is a list of files not backup in the Help area (Lower left corner of the Backup screen.

There is also another software for backing up everything: Acronis True Image WD Edition

I hope this helps you.

Cliff