Not sure if its DD or my flash drive

[Galvin]

Using vista 64 SP1 x58 chipset core i7 920
Flash drive: Kingston Data Traveler 2.0 USB device

I'm not really trusting disk director these days cause its so old now and its been giving me problems. The first thing is it says I have 4gigs of ram when vista says 6gigs. And it has some garbled text next to the computer icon above the memory size.

So the windows disk manager wouldn't let me delete the volume. So had to use diskpart command instead to do it. After that I go into DD. Create a 500mb fat32 parition. It said it needed to reboot. Found this strange since the USB drive is not a boot drive. Anyway rebooted it did its thing, then rebooted after its done. Then it did some more stuff then rebooted a second time.

Then I got a windows failed to start poperly screen, select boot normally. Everything started up fine. But now DD doesn't even see the flash drive.

But in disk management I see the 500mb Fat32 parition. But I cant format the unallocated space of 14.53GB.

So either the USB drive went bad or diskdirector is so old now thats it no longer reliable using it with intels x58 chipset. The rescue disk is useless with it now since it crashes on scanning disks. Nearly 2 years since this DD 10 came out so wouldn't be suprised if its DD. And non safe mode sees no disk, and safe mode crashes.

Testing USB drive, so far seems ok. Another thing i noticed is that I get bitlocker error in my event log even though bitlocker is not even turned on.

Also can create a 500mb partition no problem on the flash drive. But I cant format or create another volume in the unpartitioned space.

Well I ended up just formating the whole drive as fat32 16gb. For some reason if I try to create a partition smaller than the max size, vista wont let me use the unallocated space.

[MudCrab]

-{ Quote: "The first thing is it says I have 4gigs of ram when vista says 6gigs. And it has some garbled text next to the computer icon above the memory size." }-
Like this? -- (I have 3GB of RAM.)
205068

-{ Quote: "So the windows disk manager wouldn't let me delete the volume. So had to use diskpart command instead to do it. After that I go into DD. Create a 500mb fat32 parition. It said it needed to reboot. Found this strange since the USB drive is not a boot drive." }-
The reboot when making flashdrive changes is odd and I've also experienced it. I don't know why it thinks it needs to reboot to finish and I don't think that the flashdrive is detected properly when the computer reboots to DD assuming that the computer even reboots properly because it may try to boot the flashdrive and error.

I've found that using DD in Windows to work on flashdrives doesn't work very well. Booted to DD's Safe Mode usually works better (assuming Safe Mode works on your computer).

-{ Quote: "But now DD doesn't even see the flash drive." }-
This is also a common problem I've run into with DD and flashdrives. If anything is a little off, DD won't see the drive. I usually resort to Linux to wipe and reset the flashdrive and then use XP to format it. Using Vista's Diskpart's "clean" command on the flashdrive and then creating a partition may also reset the flashdrive (you can see the general procedure here (http://www.themudcrab.com/acronis_diskpart.php)), though you may have already tried this.

-{ Quote: "But in disk management I see the 500mb Fat32 parition. But I cant format the unallocated space of 14.53GB." }-
Windows will only let you create one partition on a flashdrive. Normally, you'd want to use the entire drive's space.

-{ Quote: "So either the USB drive went bad or diskdirector is so old now thats it no longer reliable using it with intels x58 chipset. The rescue disk is useless with it now since it crashes on scanning disks. Nearly 2 years since this DD 10 came out so wouldn't be suprised if its DD. And non safe mode sees no disk, and safe mode crashes." }-
You might try contacting Acronis support and seeing if you can get a build that supports your computer's chipset (I think they have a newer build). Live Chat (http://www.acronis.com/company/contacts/request/?t=2) is probably the quickest method.

[Galvin]

Thanks, yeah that screen shot is what i'm seeing.
Flash drive is fine now formatted as fat32 so I can see data on the drive when I use my dos boot cdrom.

[Galvin]

I tried the live chat. Downloaded BartPE, and spent nearly an hour only to get stuck on building source. BartPE I dont think is compatable with vista 64. I'm going to give up on this. This is getting way too complicated now for something Acronis should do for us.