Cannote Create Partition

[Dubinvero]

I cannot create a partition with DDS10. I defragmented my C drive with Perfectdisk 8.0. I have about 110 Gigs of free space on my 250 Gig single partition Raid 1 C drive. I currently run Windows XP Home on the C drive and hope to run Vista on the new partition in a dual boot arrangement.

I followed the DDS wizard to create a 50 Gig partition. I selected Active for the new partition as I want to avoid the boot.ini problems associated with dual boot Vista. When I click on Commit I get a window telling me that I need to reboot for the change to take effect. When I select reboot I can see that the new partition vanishes as XP reboots.

I ran a repair of my DDS10 install and got the same result.

Am I doing something wrong in trying to create a new partition?

Derek.

[K0LO]

Derek:

You wouldn't want to set the new partition to be "Active" yet. Doing so resets the active flag on your XP partition. I'm surprised that XP then was able to boot. DD10 must have figured that out and set the XP partition back as active, or else it just bailed out?

From what I've been reading on here, using DD10 to create and format a partition that will later have Vista installed on it can result in corruption and eventual failure of Vista. Acronis has not yet made DD10 compatible with Vista. Most posters here recommend that you set aside a block of unallocated free space with DD10 but do not format it. Then when you install Vista, let the Vista installer create and format its own partition. You can tell it where and how big during the install.

If you're going to do something special with the boot arrangement then you probably want to hide your XP partition while installing Vista. Otherwise Vista will set up its own dual-boot system with XP. If you're trying to use OS Selector to do the dual-booting with Vista then there have been a couple of posts on this forum about that topic.

[Dubinvero]

Mark,

Thanks for your feedback. I tried to create a Primary partition with the same result. I then did a chkdsk which showed a problem " free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap"

I am currently running chkdsk repair. Hopefully the repaired drive will allow me to create a partition.

Derek.