Can't Recover Unallocated Space???

[Alanw2006]

I just used Acronis to increase the size of my HD in my laptop from 250 GB to 320 GB. The upgrade was successful but my computer shows the HD as still being 250 GB. There is approximately 65 GB of unallocated space.

My OS is Vista. I have recovered unallocated space with Disk Director ("DD") on XP machines. Disk Director allowed me to recover unallocated space from the same drive letter in XP.

In the latest DD build, it does not allow me to recover the unallocated space. I want to recover the 65 GB of unallocated space and increase the size of Hard Drive (C.

Can someone please tell me how to do this?

I tried right clicking on the unallocated space and selected "create partion", but got a message that this operation failed.

I also tried to create a partition hoping that DD would give me the option of selecting the unallocated space but got the last error message.

[MudCrab]

Since four Primary partitions currently exist, all four slots in the partition table are full. This means that you can't create another partition.

You can add the unallocated space to an existing partition (DD will most likely need to move at least one since I doubt you want more space in the recovery partition).

Another option would be to convert one of the partitions to a Logical partition. This would allow you to create another Logical partition using the unallocated space. For example, if D: is just a data partition, you could convert it to a Logical partition. I wouldn't convert any of the others.

If you don't need the recovery partition and already have a backup image of it, you could delete it to free up a partition table slot.

[Alanw2006]

Originally Posted by MudCrab

Since four Primary partitions currently exist, all four slots in the partition table are full. This means that you can't create another partition.

You can add the unallocated space to an existing partition (DD will most likely need to move at least one since I doubt you want more space in the recovery partition).

Another option would be to convert one of the partitions to a Logical partition. This would allow you to create another Logical partition using the unallocated space. For example, if D: is just a data partition, you could convert it to a Logical partition. I wouldn't convert any of the others.

If you don't need the recovery partition and already have a backup image of it, you could delete it to free up a partition table slot.

MudCrab. Thanks for your response. My objective is to add the unallocated space to an existing partition. DD will not allow me to do this. I do not really want another partition. Why will DD not allow me to add the unallocated space to Hard Drive (C), the primary and active partition. This is all that I want to do.

Can I add the unallocated space to Hard Drive (C) without converting or deleting one of the other partitions?

[Alanw2006]

I had no luck using the Acronis Recovery Expert. It could not find the unallocated space.

[K0LO]

Alanw2006:

Recovery Expert is only intended to find missing partitions that used to be in unallocated space.

Can you try this? Start DD in Manual mode and right-click on your Recovery partition. Choose "Resize". You should see 0 bytes of unallocated space before the partition and 65.21 GB of unallocated space after the partition. Now interchange those two entries in the table so that all of the unallocated space is before the partition and there are 0 bytes after the partition. Make note of the size of the recovery partition and do not change the size, just the position.

Commit this operation and check the results. Now the unallocated space should be between D: and the Recovery partition.

Repeat for the D: partition, moving the unallocated space before D: and leaving 0 bytes after. Commit this change and allow Windows to reboot to re-register the change in the D: partition location.

Finally, right-click on the C: partition and choose Resize. Enlarge the partition so that there are 0 bytes of unallocated space both before and after the partition. Do this step from the boot CD when Windows is not running.

The wizard is supposed to do all of this automatically but since it failed you can do it yourself manually, step-by-step.