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I built a Windows 10 system image in VMWare Workstation that I gave a size of 64GB, so the image could be cloned onto multiple devices of any larger size. I was told that after cloning onto the target machine, I could simply open diskmgmt and refresh and it would pick up the true size of the hard drive. I have cloned this image onto my first target machine but it is not working. Disk Management is not seeing any unallocated space. It shows one EFI partition of 200MB and a C drive of 63.68GB and nothing else. This laptop has a 250GB drive, it should be showing me 186 GB of unallocated space?

EDIT: A workaround "solved" this. I actually shrunk the disk first, by 1024MB, and after that action it suddenly picked up that there was ~170 GB of unallocated space, at which point the C drive could be expanded. But why was this strange workaround necessary?

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  • Have you cloned the disk via boot from Windows 10 install media, as described here?
    – harrymc
    Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 15:52
  • @harrymc - No, this was using clonezilla for deployment to multiple machines in a volume licensed environment.
    – Vermont1981
    Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 16:55
  • Clonezilla is a Linux-based utility that sometimes has problems with Windows, so is not the ideal tool. Apparently it cloned your disk, just did it too exactly. By shrinking the disk you caused Windows to interrogate it for its architecture, so discovering the missing space. Clonezilla should have done it for you, but as I said it's not that good with Windows.
    – harrymc
    Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 17:18

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A workaround that fixes this is to first Shrink the disk by any amount (for instance 1024MB). The skrinking action forces diskmgmt to see the full size of the hard drive, at which point you can expand into the full unallocated space.

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  • Trying to expand the system disk with Windows10 I had the same exact issue: - bought new larger ssd (480gb vs 128gb) - cloned 128gb system disk over the 480gb using CloneZilla - put the 480 disk in place of the 128, removed the 128 one and rebooted. - everything worked perfectly, but both diskpart and diskmanagment tool did not see the extra 350 gb - tried the SHRINK trick inside disk part (I reclaimed just one MB) and magically the space appeared inside the disk managment tool.
    – ALoopingIcon
    Commented Aug 2, 2019 at 5:12

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