Disk Director 10.0 and USB Pen Drives

Discussion in 'Acronis Disk Director Suite' started by K0LO, Aug 2, 2006.

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  1. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    I'm a recent convert from Partition Magic 8.0 to Acronis Disk Director 10.0 build 2117 and a user/fan of Acronis True Image.

    Disk Director does not see any attached USB Pen Drives (USB Thumb Drives, USB Sticks, whatever you want to call them); only the internal hard drives on my PC. Partition Magic, however, can see and operate on the Pen Drives just fine. I'd rather use Disk Director though because of the richer feature set.

    I've searched this forum and found a couple of statements that seem to indicate that Disk Director cannot work with drives considered to be removable. I sure would like to be able to use Disk Director, so please, Acronis, consider this as a feature request for future builds.

    Is there a workaround? Is there any way to use Disk Director with these drives?
     
  2. crofttk

    crofttk Registered Member

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    Acronis Support can speak for themselves but, typically, a thumb drive is small enough, 0.5 to 2 GB ?, that it's a relatively simple matter to save it's contents en masse, if necessary, to a folder on a hard drive and then do any partitioning you want to do with the Disk Management console in Windows XP - not sure if you're running XP. That's how I would handle it for now although I agree that would be a desirable capability in ADD.
     
  3. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    True enough, but the partitioning tools in XP aren't very flexible nor can they work with Linux partitions. That's why we purchased Disk Director, correct? And if Partition Magic is considered to be a competing product, then I'd hope that Acronis would want to match or better them on features.
     
  4. crofttk

    crofttk Registered Member

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    Yep, totally agreed. I was just pointing out a workaround for the time being, understanding you could be well aware of it... it was just in case, while you see if Acronis has anything to say on this.

    Ironically, I am a long time PM 8.01 user in addition to using ADD, and it never occurred to me to plug in a thumb drive to see of PM picks it up.

    P.S. Hehe, and there it was, plain as day. LOL
     
  5. twokatmew

    twokatmew Registered Member

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    I have both PM8.01 and DD10, and I have several USB thumb drives. Both apps only see the ones that are recognized in the BIOS as hard drives. For me, neither app sees the "removable" ones.

    Regards,

    Margaret
     
  6. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Margaret:

    Are you running the Windows version of Partition Manager when you observe this behavior or the stand-alone (bootable) version?

    I have a copy of PM installed on a bootable USB thumb drive (or you can create a bootable rescue CD). If I boot the PC from this copy when there is simultaneously another USB thumb drive plugged in, then PM can see both thumb drives.

    I also have Acronis Disk Director on a bootable USB thumb drive, but when booting the PC from this copy then I cannot see other connected USB thumb drives. The Windows version of DD doesn't see them either.
     
  7. Acronis Support

    Acronis Support Acronis Support Staff

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    Hello all,

    Thank you for using Acronis Disk Management Software

    Aactually it is so.
    Probably in the nearest future the USB drive support (for managing) will be implemented in Acronis Disk Director family software.

    Thank you
    --
    Alexander Gladkov
     
  8. K0LO

    K0LO Registered Member

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    Alexander:

    That's good news. These USB thumb drives are becoming more popular for storing complete operating systems. I have a 1 GB drive that is partitioned and contains a complete Live Linux distribution with my personal preferences and programs stored on the second partition.

    I had to use the Linux command lines to set up the drive partitions and to format the drive. Partition Magic almost worked but it had the annoying feature of changing all of the drive labels to ALL CAPS, which Linux didn't like.

    It would definitely help a lot of people if you could partition and manage these drives with Acronis Disk Director.
     
  9. twokatmew

    twokatmew Registered Member

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    I was running the Windows version of PM, which I have since removed. I bought my version from PowerQuest, and AFAIK, the only option was to create two recovery floppies, which stopped working when I built a new machine. I might have been inclined to stick with it, had I been able to create other bootable media, which is one reason I switched to DD10. Trying to pair down unused apps, I've since removed PM8.01, so I can't go back and check. I'm glad to hear that Acronis is going to add additional support for USB thumb drives.

    Regards,

    Margaret
     
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