WD Black 4TB - issues after cloning using Acronis WD edition

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
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Hi

I posted a support request last week, but not had a response yet - now the forum is back online I thought I’d give it a try here!

The drive is a WD4003FZEX-00Z4SA0. It has replaced a 2TB WD Green that was getting full. I am running Windows 7 Pro from a 240GB SSD and my new WD Black drive is used for storing data, games etc and not OS.

I had 2 partitions on my old drive, labelled D and E. I installed the new drive and used the Acronis WD edition tool to clone the drive contents, allowing Acronis to dynamically grow the size of the partitions to suit the increased space, using GPT. It is formatted as a basic volume. The PC is fairly old (2009/10).

I have 2 remaining issues post-install:

  1. I have a 100MB non-active ‘EFI system partition’ which appears to be inactive and empty. There appears to be no reason for it to be there, since I’m not running an OS off this drive, but no way to remove the partition or merge it with another. Does the drive create its own reserved system space, or is this a quirk of the cloning process/the fact I’m running BIOS and not UEFI? The old drive doesn’t have a system volume.

  2. My 2 primary partitions that I’ve carried over need resizing - I need to shrink one volume from 725GB to 500GB and then allocate that free space to the other partition, which is currently 3TB. I can shrink the volume, which creates an unallocated volume of 225GB approximately, but it creates this to the right of the shrunk volume and won’t allow me to add it to the larger 3TB volume, which is off to the left. Is there a way to do this?

I’ve only tried fiddling with Acronis WD and the Win7 built in disk management utility

Many thanks

Adrian

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Well I did a little bit of searching and did not come away with a clear answer on the EFI partition. I would not have expected it, so Acronis obviously did it. Why I am not sure. All that said, it is just 100mb, I would just leave it and not worry with it.

To resize you will need a 3rd party tool as Windows behaves like your experience. That or reclone and manually set the sizes you desire.

You might look at Gparted

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