blue screen of death when trying to shrink C: (NTFS) on Thinkpad T60 + WinXP Pro SP3

[robvarga]

Hi All,

maybe you have experienced this, too:

I bought Disk Director Suite (Home) 10.0 for the sole purpose of shrinking my C: partition on my notebook.

It was a 290 GB partition with 14 GB space used on it (almost empty).

I tried to shrink it to 50 GB (so there should be plenty of space for accomodating old data).

Upon committing, the program restarted XP as expected, started up the Acronis progress screen, put some scrollbars, then displayed that it now attempts to do the shrinking operation.

Couple of seconds after this, I experienced a Blue-Screen-of-Death with the error message something like ..._NONPAGED_AREA_....

Upon restarting after the BSOD Acronis came up again, displayed some progress bars again (post operation screen, I guess), then started up.

I attempted this multiple times with the same effect.

Earlier times when I started DD after this and attempted the operation again upon realizing its failure, it attempted to lock C: and the machine became unresponsive and I had to hard reboot.

If I did a restart after XP starting up, then the deadlock did not happen.

All in all, I was not able to shrink C:.

Machine is a Thinkpad T60 notebook with a Seagate ST9320421ASG hard drive (SATA1).

Operating system is Windows XP Professional SP 3.

C: is an NTFS partition

Earlier I was able to clone my old hard drive without any problems to the very same hard drive which was used for this operation with Acronis Migrate Easy 7.0 running on Windows XP Pro SP2 (not yet SP3) on the very same machine (the old hard drive was on the same controller, the current hard drive was in the Ultrabay at cloning time, and it was on the same controller as now when doing the after cloning startup). So the only difference in driver suitability can be that I upgraded to SP3 since the after-cloning startup.

This really is making a problem for me, and I bought Disk Director for this exact thing. Someone from tech support, please help.

Best regards,

Robert Varga

[K0LO]

Robert:

When Disk Director needs to make a modification to the Windows partition it must reboot into its own recovery environment, which is Linux-based. When this process fails, it indicates that the version of Linux used does not support your hardware (probably the SATA chipset), so the program aborts without making any changes. Disk Director is going on two years old, so the included drivers are getting out of date.

There are two different ways to work around this. First, it is better to run the program from the boot CD whenever you need to modify the Windows system partition. If you have created a boot CD from the program's Bootable Media Builder application, then it should include two versions of Disk Director -- a "safe" mode (DOS-based) and a "full" mode (Linux-based). Try booting from the CD and running the safe mode version. It should see and work with your disk.

The second workaround is to download the ISO image of the updated full-mode version of Disk Director. Log into your account on the Acronis web site and go to the "Registered Products" section. Under Disk Director 10, look for the alternate ISO file. After downloading, burn it to a CD and boot the PC from the CD. The downloadable ISO contains more updated drivers.

For operations on your internal disk, the safe-mode version is simpler and faster, however.

The Windows version of the program should do fine for creating, resizing, and modifying all of the non-system partitions on your disk.

[robvarga]

Originally Posted by K0LO

Robert:

When Disk Director needs to make a modification to the Windows partition it must reboot into its own recovery environment, which is Linux-based. When this process fails, it indicates that the version of Linux used does not support your hardware (probably the SATA chipset), so the program aborts without making any changes. Disk Director is going on two years old, so the included drivers are getting out of date.

There are two different ways to work around this. First, it is better to run the program from the boot CD whenever you need to modify the Windows system partition. If you have created a boot CD from the program's Bootable Media Builder application, then it should include two versions of Disk Director -- a "safe" mode (DOS-based) and a "full" mode (Linux-based). Try booting from the CD and running the safe mode version. It should see and work with your disk.

The second workaround is to download the ISO image of the updated full-mode version of Disk Director. Log into your account on the Acronis web site and go to the "Registered Products" section. Under Disk Director 10, look for the alternate ISO file. After downloading, burn it to a CD and boot the PC from the CD. The downloadable ISO contains more updated drivers.

For operations on your internal disk, the safe-mode version is simpler and faster, however.

The Windows version of the program should do fine for creating, resizing, and modifying all of the non-system partitions on your disk.

Thanks Mark,

actually DD always displayed a Windows XP logo during its operation for me, and Windows picked up the BSOD and managed to report it to Microsoft afterwards, so the Linux-based operation seems a bit doubtful for me in this particular case.

Actually it may not have been a BSOD earlier times (I just assumed it was a BSOD earlier, too, after experiencing one), but it simply may not have done nothing at all as that also happened for me on another subsequent attempt.

Anyway, the issue is resolved (except for the cause of the BSOD which I still don't know, but don't really care so much either, now).

DD's failure to do the resize was most likely caused by a non-written (!!!) CD left in the optical drive. I did not even notice it was there as it did not turn up as a CD label under the Optical drive in the My Computer window, and being empty it did not affect the boot sequence at all.

Either that, or a USB hard drive which was also connected on earlier attempts.

However, once I removed that disk from the DVD drive (and disconnected the USB drives, too) and reattempted the operation, DD managed to carry out the resize!!!

The funny thing is that the Log in DD did not contain anything at any of the attempts except that it started to commit the pending operations, but no finish message, no error, nothing. Actually, it did not contain more even after successfully resizing the C: partition (no success message).

All in all: remove EVERYTHING from the optical/floppy drives and disconnect USB drives before starting the operations.

Best regards,

Robert