Cylinder Boundaries

Hi All,

I was just curious about cylinder boundaries. I recently purchased a 200GB Maxtor drive and wanted to partition it like so:

C - 20GB
D - 40GB
E - 60GB
F - 80GB

I used the Maxblast software to partition the drive, but when I cloned my old drive to the new drive, the partitions got changed to this (roughly):

C - 24GB
D - 50GB
E - 50GB
F - 70GB

So then I decided to use TI8 (current version) to partition the drive and found out that I couldn't get my C drive partition below 24GB......something about cylinder boundaries. I was just curious as to why TI won't let me create a partition smaller than 24GB when Maxblast would. And why won't TI just restore the images onto my custom partitions w/o messing w/ them? My old drive was an 80GB and partitioned something like this:

C - 10GB
D - 20GB
E - 20GB
F - 30GB

LONG story short, I ended up sticking w/ TI's partitioning scheme. It works, but it would've been nice to have made my F drive a bit bigger. The other drives are a little too big now, especially my D drive.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Joe

 

Hello Joe,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

We are really sorry for the inconveniences.

Please note that Acronis True Image is not a partitioning tool. You may use Acronis Disk Director Suite 9.0 (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/) to manage your partitions. Could you please describe how you have tried to partition your disk?

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Hi Ilya,

Thanks for responding. I'm merely just curious. What are cylinder boundaries and why won't TI8 let me create partitions smaller than 24GB? I used the Maxblast utility that came w/ my Maxtor drive to partition the drive to this:

C - 20GB
D - 40GB
E - 60GB
F - 80GB

When I tried to clone my old drive to the new one, the partitions got changed to this:

C - 24GB
D - 50GB
E - 50GB
F - 70GB

I then used the partitioning feature in TI8 to make the partitions the way I want and that's when I found out that it won't let me make partitions smaller than 24GB, citing cylinder boundaries.

I did do a search on "cylinder boundaries" and most of the references relate to Linux, Unix, Windows 3.1, and drives no bigger than 2.1GB. I guess I can always use partitioning software to resize the partitions the way I want, but I'm wondering if TI8 is just being "safe" when it creates the partitions the way it does or if there is an even more important reason, such as OS or filesystem issues? Why is Maxblast able to partition my drive the way I want and TI8 can't?

I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2. My C drive is FAT32 and the rest are NTFS.

Thanks again,

Joe