Cannot Increase Size of Partition with Bad Blocks

Many moons ago I used Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 to divide my drive into multiple partitions. Today I ran out of space on my C: drive and tried to increase but got a notification that I could not increase the size of a drive with bad blocks. I ran chkdsk and fixed the blocks but still get the same error.

Anyway, to fix or do I need to get a new drive and copy the image from my old drive - then resize C (or can I increase the size of C as part of the imaging?). BTW - I also have TrueImage. If this is the fix then I would appreciate instructions on the safest way to image the entire drive.

I would rather not get a new drive - but if this is the only way to increase the size of C: then I will.

 

I have also contemplated trying to image to C: to a different partition. Then deleting my original C: - then renaming the new partition "C:". Is that a possibility?

 

You can't do the resize with DD.

Hopefully, you have previously done successful backups and restores with TI.

Using TI, the easiest way would be to do the following:

1. Run chkdsk /r on the partition with errors to make sure all the bad sectors are marked as bad.
2. Create an image of the Entire Disk with TI (check the Disk # checkbox). This will give you a current backup of the entire drive before you start making changes.
3. Delete the partition with DD.
4. Use TI to restore the image to the unallocated space or create the partition with DD the size you want and then restore to it. Make sure to just check to restore the partition so you get the option to resize it.
5. After you get booted back into Windows, run chkdsk /r on the partition. This is necessary to mark the bad sectors as some or all of them may have been used. Hopefully, chkdsk can fix the problems. Otherwise, you should be able to restore any corrupted files from your backup image. If any important system files end up on bad sectors, the system may not boot properly or may error.

 

I have not previously done any backups or restores with TI, however the C: partition seems to be working fine - I just cannot increase the size as it has bad blocks. Unfortunately this means I don't have much experience with TI.

Reading your response - I guess I need to buy a new drive and in order to make an image of the entire drive. I guess this would be safest to give me a good image in case all goes bad.

Then I would delete the C: partition (with bad blocks) on the "old" drive, next use TI to restore the image of just C: from the "new" drive image to unallocated space on the "old" drive.

Will this new imaged partition from the unallocated space now be called "C" or will I have to rename? I just want to make sure it is recognized as the partition to boot from.

If all goes well with this then I should end up with a spare drive with a complete image if the original, correct?

 

Before you try to do what you want, it's important to have a good image backup of the Entire Disk and know that you can restore successfully. There are many posts of people trying to do simple partitioning procedures and losing their data or partitions because something goes wrong and they didn't back it up first.

Correct. However, you also need to test that you can do a successful restore. This may require another drive if your image won't fit on your existing drive.

You could do that. If you have enough free space on you old drive, you could also save the backup image there and then restore the partitions to the new drive.

The C: partition should remain C: in Windows. It may be assigned a different drive letter when booted to the TI CD so be sure to give your partitions meaningful names.

Yes. Depending on which way you do it, your backup image will either be on the old drive or the new drive.

If it were me, I'd try to get the new drive setup as the main drive. If the old one is getting enough bad sectors for them to start causing a problem, I would just replace it.

 

Mudcrab – thanks for the great reply. Searching the forum I came across some great information and some outstanding guides written by Grover Hatcher with input from you, BrianK, and Menorcaman. Really good stuff here – thanks for all your efforts.

Onto my adventure………..

To ensure I could create and recover and Archive:

1) Installed TI 2009 –> Created Boot Disk -> Used “One-Click” to create backup of system volume 'C:' and MBR onto Partition ‘I:’. (Did NOT create Secure Zone and did NOT activate Acronis Recovery Manager).

2) Next I restored this backup to an external USB 2.0 drive. Restore -> whole disk and partitions (sector by sector NOT selected) -> Selected MyBackup.tib and MBR as soruce -> Selected external drive to restore to -> Selected Active -> Resized to 140Gb (from 18Gb to test restore & resize function) -> Proceed.

3) Once the restoration was complete I shut down power, removed drive 0 from the computer, and installed external drive in its place. Booted and everything worked fine (except for the fact that I didn’t back up all the partitions).

Should I run chkdsk /r on this newly created drive/partition?

With this I felt comfortable that I could recreate my current drive with bad sectors onto a new purchased drive.

4) First I used Disk Management to get a graphic representation of my drive.

5) Next step was to create a backup image of the entire drive. Backup -> My Computer -> Source: Selected all partitions on Drive 0 (did NOT select sector-by sector) -> Destination: Selected external USB 2.0 drive -> Create NEW backup archive -> Backup Method – FULL -> No File exclusions -> Compression-NORMAL -> Priority-NORMAL -> Proceed

6) When I woke up the next morning True Image was closed, so I opened and tried to validate the backup. The default source was the test image on drive 'I:'so I browsed to the external drive and selected the correct image. However I received a popup “This is not the last volume of the backup archive”. This would seem to be the type of error you would get if I had made an incremental or differential backup, however, I made a full backup. Note I did put the date into file name, though that shouldn’t matter.

Any thoughts on why I would get this message? I’m not sure what TI looks at to decide if it is the last volume of an archive. Could it be just a bad image giving me this message?

Obviously I need to resolve this before I attempt to recreate my drive on the new drive.

 

Just realized this started out a DD question and has now become a TI question - so I guess it's now in the incorrect forum. I will copy my last post over to the TI forum.