I have a 256GB M.2 NVMe drive that's getting a little full, so purchased
a 512GB replacement.

The original is bitlockered (I have multiple copies of the recovery key
in safe places) but a bit of checking seemed to say it's safe to clone a
drive while it's bitlockered.

So put the original into a USB3 enclosure, put the new blank one in the
M.2 slot, booted from PartedMagic USB stick, cloned disk-2-disk using
clonezilla, letting it grow partitions and filesystems to size of larger
disk.

Which it did, then according to diskpart.exe and diskmgmt.msc the new
partition was about double, the bitlockering was still intact, but
according to windows explorer, I had no more free space than on the old
smaller disk, huh?

Tried to resize the partition by minus 1MB to see if that would
"resolve" it, but diskmmgt wouldn't shrink it, neither would parted GUI,
had to remove bitlockering, then parted would shrink it, then after the
usual chkdsk windows explorer was happy to see the extra space

All seems a bit odd?

On 19/09/2021 07:20 pm, Andy Burns wrote:
> I have a 256GB M.2 NVMe drive that's getting a little full, so purchased
> a 512GB replacement.
>
> The original is bitlockered (I have multiple copies of the recovery key
> in safe places) but a bit of checking seemed to say it's safe to clone a
> drive while it's bitlockered.
>
> So put the original into a USB3 enclosure, put the new blank one in the
> M.2 slot, booted from PartedMagic USB stick, cloned disk-2-disk using
> clonezilla, letting it grow partitions and filesystems to size of larger
> disk.
>
> Which it did, then according to diskpart.exe and diskmgmt.msc the new
> partition was about double, the bitlockering was still intact, but
> according to windows explorer, I had no more free space than on the old
> smaller disk, huh?
>
> Tried to resize the partition by minus 1MB to see if that would
> "resolve" it, but diskmmgt wouldn't shrink it, neither would parted GUI,
> had to remove bitlockering, then parted would shrink it, then after the
> usual chkdsk windows explorer was happy to see the extra space
>
> All seems a bit odd?

PM didn't change the numbers in the allocation table?

--
Chris Elvidge
England

Andy Burns wrote:
> I have a 256GB M.2 NVMe drive that's getting a little full, so purchased
> a 512GB replacement.
>
> The original is bitlockered (I have multiple copies of the recovery key
> in safe places) but a bit of checking seemed to say it's safe to clone a
> drive while it's bitlockered.
>
> So put the original into a USB3 enclosure, put the new blank one in the
> M.2 slot, booted from PartedMagic USB stick, cloned disk-2-disk using
> clonezilla, letting it grow partitions and filesystems to size of larger
> disk.
>
> Which it did, then according to diskpart.exe and diskmgmt.msc the new
> partition was about double, the bitlockering was still intact, but
> according to windows explorer, I had no more free space than on the old
> smaller disk, huh?
>
> Tried to resize the partition by minus 1MB to see if that would
> "resolve" it, but diskmmgt wouldn't shrink it, neither would parted GUI,
> had to remove bitlockering, then parted would shrink it, then after the
> usual chkdsk windows explorer was happy to see the extra space
>
> All seems a bit odd?

Partition size changes work just like in Linux.
Except in Windows, you hardly ever see the details
leap up and bite you.

To make a partition larger, the steps are:

1) Make partition table size entry larger. This is the
"envelope" the file system must not extend past.

2) Now, in the file system header sector, change the
declaration of how many clusters are in the file system.
Usually, a fraction of a cylinder at the end of the
partition, is not used. That means slack of 8MB or less.
The file system doesn't just snuggle up to the end of
the envelope like it might.

Some file system types, also require lengthy storage dimension
changes as well, during step 2.

But anyway, in Windows it is possible for a resize to fail
after Step 1 (Peter Jason had such a failure once). The
envelope consumes the space all right, but when the
Step 2 fails and the file system header is not modified,
the user gets no additional space.

At a guess, this is some kind of Bitlocker limitation.

*******

They call that "Unlock" here, but who knows whether this
is a concept, or just their made-up label for it.

https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager-software/resize-bitlocker-partition.html

Paul