Failed to create the partition

[schntirol]

Disk Director recognizes that the drive is 465.8GB and it also recognizes that there is a 30GB (Windows XP) NTFS, a 22GB fat32, a 24.5GB (FreeBSD) partition and that there is 388.5GB of "Unallocated" space. When I select the Unallocated space and click on "Create Partition" I get a "Failed to create the partition" notice.

I have tried the update to the driver and there is no change. What should I do now?

I am currently stuck with a 500GB drive and Disk Director is only allowing me to use 76.5GB's of it. This is rather annoying :)

[K0LO]

schntirol:

Could you post a screen shot showing what DD sees in its main window? Start DD in manual mode before making the screen shot.

[schntirol]

http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/8528/acronisisapainintheass.jpg

[K0LO]

schntirol:

I suspected what your screen shot is illustrating so clearly. You have four primary partitions already so your partition table is full. There are only four slots in a partition table. Each primary partition occupies one slot. An extended partition container also occupies one slot but may contain an unlimited number of logical partitions. So you can have at maximum four primary partitions only, or three primary partitions and an unlimited number of logical partitions.

If you want to add additional partitions to your disk you will first need to convert one of the primary partitions to a logical partition. After you do this you can continue to add as many additional logical partitions as you want.

Your first two partitions need to remain primaries. Depending on how FreeBSD boots, its partition may also need to remain primary. Your simplest course of action is to use Disk Director to convert your photos partition from primary to logical. After doing that you can add additional logical partitions.

For maximum safety make sure that you have backed up the contents of your photos partition before converting. If you have Acronis True Image then make a full disk backup before doing any partition operations (just in case).

P. S. -- When you convert your P: partition to a logical partition and then reboot into Windows, you'll probably find that Windows will assign drive letter D: to the partition. If this happens just use Disk Management console to change the drive letter back to P:

[schntirol]

K0lo, You tha man. Thanks for the help. One more question... the first Primary partition is a Dell Utility... with it's own bootwiz etc. Do I even need that having Acronis? It would be nice to install windows 7 on this machine later and it seems that 3 primaries and a logical or two is all that I'll be able to squeeze onto the drive.

[K0LO]

Judging from the graphic, there isn't much data stored in the Dell Utility partition. So it isn't a recovery partition. It probably just contains diagnostic tools.

You could make an image of it with True Image and store it away (or just delete it - your choice). That would free up one more slot in the partition table.