Disk Director Suite - Cannot create partition

I just e-mailed the following message to Acronis technical support with an attached system report I generated using Acronis software. Hopefully, I'll receive their help soon.

I am using Windows XP Professional SP2 with Director Suite Version 9.0 Build 518.

I was successfully able to create a partition on my external hard drive G where none had existed. When I later tried on 2 separate occasions to create an NTFS partition in the NTFS free space on my primary internal hard drive C (disk 1) where a small FAT16 partition resides (for the EISA configuration from Dell), each time at the end of the processing I got the message: ERROR: Unable to write disk 1 sector 0 (Retry, Ignore, ignore All). Pressing “R” and “I” did not work; pressing “A” completed the operation and rebooted. While the amount of space I designated for the new logical partition WAS subtracted from the available free space on disk 1, the new logical drive partition did not appear. I ran the recovery / chkdsk tools and, each time as reported by several programs such as Windows Explorer and Disk Director, the total free space on disk 1 had shrunk and the total used space had increased by the designated new partition size, except that the new partition did not exist. Fortunately, I was able to revert to the original hard drive before these attempts at partitioning disk 1 by using Norton’s GoBack software.

It appears that something is preventing the writing of the new partition information to the boot drive (sector 0). Could it be protected by Norton SystemWorks 2005 or some other software? What could be the reasons that it cannot write to sector 0? Are there any utilities in your software suite or some other software that would pinpoint the problem and allow me to fix it so that I can use your software to create a new partition?

Please help! Thank you.

[Acronis Support]

Hello MikeB,

Thank you for using Acronis Disk Director Suite (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing.../diskdirector/).

Please accept our apologies for your inconvenience.

To answer your question we need Acronis report file that includes the information about your partitions. Please wait for an answer from our Support Team.

Thank you.

Andrew,

When do you anticipate replying to me? Have you received my e-mail with the Acronis Report?

Thank you.

[Acronis Support]

Hello Mike,

Could you please let me know the Acronis # of your request?

Thank you.

Andrew,

I do not know what you mean by the "Acronis #". I received the following e-mail delivery receipt:

Reporting-MTA: dns; support.acronis.com
Arrival-Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 08:17:49 +0300

Final-Recipient: RFC822; support@acronis.com
X-Actual-Recipient: X-Unix; |/opt/rt3/bin/rt-spamfilter --notspam 3 --template=/opt/rt3/mail/confirm.tmpl.en --return-path=confirmation-return@acronis.com -- /opt/rt3/bin/rt-mailgate --queue support --action correspond --url http://support.acronis.com
Action: delivered (to mailbox)
Status: 2.1.5
Last-Attempt-Date: Thu, 25 Nov 2004 09:11:12 +0300

I have forwarded to you a duplicate of my original e-mail. Please respond ASAP.

Thank you.

Andrew,

Here is my e-mail delivery receipt for my duplicate e-mail to you moments ago:

Reporting-MTA: dns; support.acronis.com
Arrival-Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 07:57:28 +0300

Final-Recipient: RFC822; support@acronis.com
X-Actual-Recipient: X-Unix; |/opt/rt3/bin/rt-spamfilter --notspam 3 --template=/opt/rt3/mail/confirm.tmpl.en --return-path=confirmation-return@acronis.com -- /opt/rt3/bin/rt-mailgate --queue support --action correspond --url http://support.acronis.com
Action: delivered (to mailbox)
Status: 2.1.5
Last-Attempt-Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2004 08:13:40 +0300

Please confirm your receipt of my e-mail by replying to my e-mail or by posting here.

Thanks.

[Acronis Support]

Hello MikeB,

Could you please let me know either your email address or a subject of the message that you have sent to support@acronis.com? I still cannot find it.

Thank you.

Andrew,

I cannot imagine why you cannot find my e-mails. The subject in my both e-mails to support@acronis.com was "Disk Director Suite Version 9.0 - Cannot Create Partition" just as I have stated from my original thread - it was the same subject line as this. I do not want to disclose my e-mail address on this public forum. Perhaps you can give me another e-mail address to resend this information?

In case your system is blocking my e-mails because they contain your required attachment, the Acronis Report, I just e-mailed to you a plain text e-mail with the caption "Andrew, are you there?". If you receive this e-mail, please reply to it, and I'll reply with my original e-mail attachment.

Thanks.

[Acronis Support]

Hello Michael,

I've found all your emails to us (with all attachments) and will definitely reply to your email address soon.

Thank you.

Andrew,

I'm still waiting for your reply. When should I expect it?

I'm considering asking for a refund as I'm still within the 30-day satisfaction guaranty period. If I cannot create a partition, your product is not worth anything to me.

Mike

[Acronis Support]

Dear Mike,

I have sent you a reply on Dec 07. It is given below:

****************************************************************
Hello Michael,

Please accept our sincere apologies for your inconvenience. We do apologize for the delayed response.

This problem is definitely concerned with Norton GoBack. The thing is that Norton GoBack changes partition table and protects it from any changes. Please disable or uninstall Norton GoBack before using Acronis Disk Director Suite to partition your hard disk drive.

Obviously Norton GoBack doesn't monitor your external hard disk drive and so you were able to create a NTFS partition there.

Thank you.

--
Best regards,
Andrew Berezovsky

****************************************************************

Andrew,

Thank you for your response through this forum. I did not receive your e-mail, however, I will try your suggestion regarding GoBack and let you know if I have any further problems.

Here is an exerpt from my 12/20/04 e-mail to Andrew to which he has yet to respond. Perhaps Andrew will respond to this?

Andrew,

Thank you for your assistance through the forum. I never did receive an e-mail from you in response to the prior e-mails below.

I now have a new problem. I am using Norton’s GoBack which, in order to repartition my C: drive, I needed to disable GoBack as you had stated. I was able to successfully repartition my external hard drive (H without disabling GoBack when I first purchased Disk Director Suite because GoBack is configured for my C: drive only. When I twice attempted to increase the amount of space on my virtual Z: partition by taking some of the available space from drive H:, after the display “Analyzing partitions [###...###] 100% appeared, the following message resulted:

ERROR: Disk not found.

Press any key to reboot your computer.

In both attempts, pressing any key would not reboot my frozen computer, so I had to turn off the power. In the first attempt, as a result of this crash, I had some serious hard disk errors that, due to some fatal blue screen errors, necessitated me to GoBack to a time just prior to attempting the increase in free space. In the second attempt, after restarting the PC, it appeared that the final portion of the Acronis batch file executed and the statement “Completed” appeared; however, after rebooting, the increase in free space did not occur and the partitions remained status quo.

How can I get past this point and successfully increase my free space?

I have attached the Acronis report.

Thank you.

[Added 12/22/04 in duplicate e-mail: I would prefer to not disable GoBack as I am fearful that Acronis, with its bugs, could irreparably crash my hard disks. Since GoBack is only protecting and locking the partitions on my local C: drive, I would think that the external drive is not affected by GoBack and its partitions ought to be easily resizable.]

[saublebeach]

Hi MikeB

I had similar problems after installing Norton GoBack over top of OS Selector 8, although I did not realize it until I tried to use my recovery disk while upgrading to Disk Director Suite 9.

I had to uninstall Norton GoBack, not just disable it, in order for me to successfully install and use the Acronis utilities.

Everything has been working well since.

Hope everything works out as well for you!!

Thank you, saublebeach, for your feedback. With my situation, I was successful in the original partitioning of an external hard drive with GoBack installed and enabled on the internal hard drive. I could not partition the internal hard drive until I disabled GoBack. After succesfully partitioning my internal and external hard drives and re-enabling GoBack, I have not been able to increase my free space on my external had drive.

Hopefully, Andrew (tech support) will be able to help me.

[Acronis Support]

Hello Mike,

Your request has been received and handled by Ivan Belinsky. Please let him help you to resolve this issue.

Thank you.

--
Andrew Berezovsky

Thank you, Andrew. Will Ivan be contacting me via e-mail? When should I anticipate his response?

[Acronis Support]

Hello Mike,

Ivan did send you an email on Wed. Dec 22. Did you receive it?

Thank you.

--
Andrew Berezovsky

Andrew,

I have never received an e-mail from either you or Ivan. I am not aware of having any difficulties receiving e-mails from anyone else.

Please have Ivan resend his e-mail to the reply e-mail address in my e-mail to you, with a cc: to my go.com e-mail account as follows: m??@go.com, but replace the ?? with my last name. Also, please reply to this thread when you or Ivan have resent the e-mail so that I'll be on the lookout for it. Thanks.

Andrew,

Please respond to my previous thread.

Thank you.

Andrew,

I still have not received a response from you. Please help.

[Acronis Support]

Hello Mike,

We are very sorry for the inconviniences.

Apparently there is some problem in e-mail delivery.

I will cite what Ivan recommended you to do:
--------------------------------------------------
Hello,

Please accept our apologies for the delay with the response and thank you for using Acronis software.

Please make sure that you use the latest build (524),
that is available on our web site at:
http://www.acronis.com/support/updates/

To get the access to updates you should
register your software first at:
http://www.acronis.com/registration/

Please do not forget to disable any download managers, internet
download/connection boosters, etc. before the download.

If you use the latest build and this issue still persists could you please download a special Acronis drivers installation program from:
http://www.acronis.com/files/support/SnapAPI_s_e.exe
Install the update choosing "Enable logging" option.

Reproduce the problem and send us c:\snapapi.log file.

Thank you.
--
Sincerely yours,
Ivan Belinsky

Acronis, Inc.
395 Oyster Point Blvd., Suite 213
South San Francisco, CA 94080 USA
http://www.acronis.com

Acronis Support Department
e-mail: support@acronis.com
-----------------------------------------------

If the problem still persists please send me a private message for this will be much more faster.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman