Can ATI 10 Home re-order partitions?

Hi all,

I'm using the demo version of ATI 10 Home, but I'm not sure if it can do what I need. I have a Thinkpad T60 with an 80GB 5400 rpm drive. I now have a 100GB 7200 rpm drive that I wish to turn into the boot drive. I also have the SATA drive adapter for the T60, so that both drives can be mounted at the same time. I know that part works.

The problem is this: for whatever reason, when I installed Vista Ultimate on the 80GB drive and asked for a C: and D: partition, the installer created D: first, then C:. Now that I'm migrating to a new drive, I'd like to make C: the first partition and D: the second one.

There is also the Lenovo ThinkVantage pre-desktop area on the OEM drive, which is a hidden and protected partition about 5 GB in size. I don't need to transfer this to the new drive, since I have recovery media on DVD already.

Here's the existing drive's layout:

80GB 5400 rpm drive:
0 - 30 GB (D: )
1 - 40 GB (C:, boot)
2 - 5 GB (hidden pre-desktop area)

Here's the new drive's layout:

100GB 7200 rpm drive:
0 - 30 GB (C:, boot)
1 - 50 GB (D: )
2 - 11 GB (unallocated)

I want to do three things:

1. Swap the order of C: and D:
2. Resize C: and D:
3. Omit the pre-desktop partition.

I picked Manage Hard Disks -> Clone Disk, but that only lets me perform task 2, resizing the partitions. I cannot choose which partitions to clone, nor can I specify the order they should be created on the destination disk.

I then tried Backup, which does allow me to choose only the two partitions, but now I need some place to store the backup image. Given that I only have these two drives, how do I do that? Is there a way to simply transfer C: and then D: from the source disk to the destination disk?

Should I be looking at ATI Workstation instead?

 

What you are doing "wrong" is trying to do both partition transfers in one step. Think about them as individual, separate steps instead.

You do need a place to store an image of C and an image of D. If you don't have an external hard drive, you can possibly use the other existing partition on the old drive. If there isn't enough free space, you need either a network drive or an external drive. A 40GB or larger USB2 drive is pretty cheap if you can't borrow one.

Here are the steps:

1. Delete all the partitions on the new drive.

2. Make an image of only C on the old drive and restore it to the new drive adjusting the size as you wish.

3. Edit the C:\BOOT.INI file on the new drive to point to the first partition instead of the second as the location of Windows.

4. Confirm that you can boot from the new hard drive. If you can't, search the forum for tips on fixing the Master Boot Record, MBR.

5. Make an image of only D on the old drive and restore it to the new drive expanding it to the entire rest of the drive.

Steps 3 and 4 could be done after step 5 if that's more convenient.

 

Thanks, John. I intially avoided the image backup thinking it would only capture the filesystem in the partition, but miss things like the MBR, etc. The clone backup option sounded like the best bet at the time.

Here's what I ended up doing:

1. perform an image backup of C: and D:, saving the *.tib files to the new drive (freshly formatted)
2. copy the *.tib files back to the original drive
3. restore the image files from the old drive to the new drive
4. reboot with the Vista DVD to repair the installation on both drives

Thanks to the compression option, I was able to fit the *.tib files in the remaining free space on the original drive.

I expected the new drive not to boot because of the change in partition order, but for some reason, even the original drive would not boot! My only recourse was to reboot with the Vista DVD and repair the drives. Thankfully, that went without a hitch, and both drives are now bootable again.

Vista, if installed as the only OS, no longer uses boot.ini. It has something called BCD (Boot Configuration Data) now, and you use bcdedit.exe to fiddle with the settings. I'm not familiar enough with BCD yet, so I suspect taking the install DVD repair route is the fastest way to get things working again.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/driver/tips/debug_vista.mspx

Anyway, I now have my C: and D: partitions migrated over to the 100GB drive, resized and in the right order, and I have 20 GB unallocated, perhaps to play with OS X.

 

If you wish, you can use TI 10 to merge that 20GB of unallocated space into either your C: or D: partition as follows:

- Use TI's Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard to create a Secure Zone (SZ) in the unallocated space. DO NOT accept the default option to also activate the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager.
- After the SZ has been created, use the Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard again to "Remove" the SZ. Select either your C: or D: partition as the place to return the space being used by the SZ.

Regards

 

How does Acronis handle non-contiguous areas? I'm assuming it cannot merge the C: partition with free space that's on the other side of the D: partition. In any case, Vista's Disk Management can grow/shrink NTFS volumes now.

http://www.luxography.ca/Images/Other/vista_extend_volume.png

 

That's very odd. Making an image certainly shouldn't affect the booting. Hmmm....

I missed that you were on Vista. Yes, I agree that the DVD is the easy way to go. Pity the poor person who didn't get the DVD.

Good work!