Disk Director 10 problems doing merges and with Boot CD.

Hello all, hope someone can help with my problem. I just purchased and downloaded latest version of Acronis Disk Director 10 yesterday and have had some problems with it. I have created the Boot Media CD and when I use it to boot up on my Asus M50SV-A1 laptop it loads up, I select the full Director suite and it says that no hard drives are detected. What's going on with that? The hard drive is installed in the laptop and working 100% fine. I tried making a 2nd Bootable Media CD to make sure the burn was okay. The 2nd Boot disc does the same thing. Does not recognize that a hard drive exists in the laptop! I emailed Acronis tech support, but they take a long time to respond. Hope someone here knows the answer.

Also, before I tried to boot from the CD, I attempted to merge two partiions on my C: drive. I selected the C: partition and said to merge the F: partition on the same drive. The software just sat there saying "...analysing C: disk..." for a long while... then ultimately throws an error message saying an error has occurred and it cannot continue. The message also says that they will send a fix when they get one for this problem...! what the?

My main concern is that the bootable software does not recognize a C: drive is installed (when it is). This a terrible bug. How can one work on the hard drive if it does not even show up. Hope there is a simple answer to this.

edit:
Oh, if it helps, the hard drive is a 200GB, 7200RPM Seagate Momentus 7200.2 drive. It is loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium OS in about a 97GB C: primary boot partition. There was a D: partition with some recovery data info. I resized that D: partition down sizing it to 1.52GB and then I reallocated the left over space to a new F: partition which is now blank. My goal was to merge this recovered F: drive space with the C: drive to create one big C: drive. As stated above the attempt to merge the two partitions here, fails. I tried many times running Disk Director inside Windows Vista. ( I solved this by later deleting the F: partition and then just resizing the C: drive to larger size taking up the extra freed space.
However the Boot disk not recognizing any drives is a big problem still!

 

OnlyMe:

When you made your Boot Media CD, did you include both "full" and "safe" mode versions of Disk Director? If so, try the safe mode version.

The explanation for the full mode version not seeing your disk is that the boot media uses Linux for the full mode and the version used may not have the right drivers for your SATA disk.

Safe mode should work for you. To get full mode working you can log into your account on the Acronis web site and file a support request. Acronis may be able to supply you with a CD iso image that includes drivers for your hardware.

Two other alternatives are to use BartPE or WindowsPE. You can find further info on both of these approaches by searching the TrueImage forum for posts by Mustang that include one of those two search terms.

 

k0lo, yes, I created the boot disk with everything on it.
I will try using the safe mode booting with the CD and see if it recognizes the hard drive. Will post back result when I get a chance to do this.

Thanks for the reply and suggestions.

 

k0lo, I just tried to boot up with the DD CD in Safe Mode and it booted up okay. However this time I had my external USB 2.0 hard drive connected to the laptop also, so there were two drives that showed up (in Safe Mode). The internal hard drive was recognized in Safe Mode. But it seems to have a watered down menu and function/features set.
Can I still perform all the functions in Safe mode that I can in the Full package mode and it will work just the same? I am hoping it will.

I tried booting up the CD in full mode one more time with the external USB drive still attached this time. Again, it did not recognize the internal C: drive but this time it did not error out and halt (like before), because it detected the external USB hard drive attached and had something to work with. It only displayed the information for the external drive, and nothing for the internal drive.

Also, I have another laptop on hand (a Toshiba A105) and I tried the Acronis DD Boot CD in full mode on that laptop booting from the CD. It works just fine on the Toshiba laptop and recognized the internal C: disk right away (in full mode). The hard drive in the Toshiba is a 160GB, 5400RPM Seagate HD.

Seems you were correct, that it does not have the proper drivers to recognize my new 200GB, Seagate Momentus 7200.2 HD. Why would they not include all the drivers for all the HD's in the full version but they include it in the Safe version is beyond me.

 

The Safe Mode version is DOS-based and uses the computer's BIOS to access the hardware. The drivers used are completely different than the Linux drivers used in the Full Mode version. Basically, if the BIOS can see the drive, the Safe Mode version should be able to work with it.

You should be able to do the same procedures will all the versions of DD (Full, Safe and Windows) if the particular version correctly supports your hardware. The Safe Mode version is not "watered down" from the Full Mode version.

 

K0lo,

I read a thread you participated in a while back where a guy tried to change his cluster size from 4 to 16 in order to use diskeeper and was having serious trouble. All of a sudden the computer wasn't recognizing his hard drives and it turned out Vista won't boot with a 16kb cluster size. the solution involved creating a boot partition with DD and moving the boot records over. This worked on my system and now i need to do it again on another system. I CANNOT find that thread to save my life. Could you point me in the right direction?

Many apologies to everyone for the extraneous thread post. I'm in a serious situation and the Private Message system is apparantly down for whatever reason.

 

Here is the link to the thread: Resized clusters. Can't boot Vista

You may also glean some information on copying Vista's booting files from Part 5 of my guide: Separating Vista and XP when using Vista's Boot Manager

 

MudCrab, Thanks for that tidbit of info on the DD suites. It explains it to me now. (I still have not heard back from Acronis tech support though). Why can't they give out these explanations and answers! They always say to go download some logging program, run it and then send it back to them for analysis... that to me takes way too much time when I need to get up and going fast. This forum is a great asset to them for sure in resolving problems!
Thanks again to you and KolO for the answers to my dilema.