Disk Director Not Working

I purchased the Acronis Disk Director Suite this morning with intentions on solving an ongoing problem I have had with my Sony laptop. The drive was partitioned into a C and D partition at the factory, with the C partition only being 5GB, which is just not big enough using Windows XP Pro.

I have run Disk Director four times already, and each time it appears to be doing what it is supposed to do, but ultimately, the drives are unaffected. The first two times I ran it in auto mode, choosing to make more room on the C partition, it did its thing, and all the Acronis messages during the reboot process were positive (no errors), but once the computer has completed rebooting, the drives are just as they were before I ran the program (yes, I did click the Commit button).

The second two times I ran it in the manual mode, and attempted to merge the two partitions with the exact same results.

Any ideas on what I am doing wrong?

Bob Buckley

 

Bob:

I don't trust the automated wizards to do the right thing. Try the manual method:

1. Start DD in manual mode and then right-click on your D partition.
2. Choose "Resize".
3. Drag the slider on the left side of the graphic to shrink the size of the D partition. This will simultaneously move the contents of D farther to the right in the partition. Shrink it by the amount that you want to later add to the C partition.
4. Click "OK". You should see the pending results which are a smaller D partition and free space between the C and D partitions.
5. Click on the checkered flag to commit.
6. If Windows needs to reboot, go ahead. Come back to DD when it's finished.
7. Check your results. You should now have a smaller D partition and free space between the C and D partitions.
8. Next, right-click on the C partition and choose "Resize".
9. Drag the slider on the right side of the graphic to enlarge the C partition. Enlarge it until it encompasses all of the free space. Do not move the data within the partition; just the boundary. To do this make sure you use the "handle" on the graphic image that is the furthest to the right.
10. Click on "OK".
11. Click on the checkered flag to commit.
12. This one will require a reboot.
13. Check that the desired result has been achieved.

As always, backup your data before doing any of this!!

 

Mark,

The first part worked flawlessly, unfortunately the second part would not, I have tried repeatedly to follow your instructions, and do now have a 4.19GB unallocated space between the two partitions, and it will allow me to stretch the C partition to utilize the unallocated space, but after I click on commit, it does it's thing, but after it reboots, the C partition is still at a little over 5GB, and the unallocated space is still 4.19GB.

I also tried to just take a portion of it, but that did not work either.

I really appreciate your advice, and I did make some progress, but no part of your advice was included in the Acronis instructions, so they definitely need to review that, and hopefully you have another trick or two to help me get the C partition larger.

Thanks,

Bob Buckley

 

Bob:

By any chance do you have Norton GoBack running on your laptop? Or, any program similar to GoBack? These types of programs will prevent changes to the disk layout or partition table, so you would need to disable them.

Another suggestion is to make a bootable recovery disk version of DD on a CD or on a USB flash drive. Then you can boot into DD and work on your C drive when it's not busy running Windows.

 

Mark,

I do not own any Norton or Symantec products (I have never had much luck with them, and now refuse to load any of them on any of my computers, and always delete any that are included with new computers).

I do not really understand the last part of your post, and was hoping that the Acronis Disk Director solftware would keep me from having to do things that I do not know or understand how to do.

Looks like it just won't do what I need to do, which is why I purchased it in the firstplace. Just one more software disappointment.

Bob Buckley

 

Success at last, I converted the unallocated space into a drive and assigned it a drive letter (F), then merged the two drives (C and F), and Disk Director worked perfectly. I now have a C partition that is a little under 10GB, and can for the first time in a VERY long time actually run the defrag routine.

Mark, thanks for your help.

Bob Buckley

 

Bob:

Sorry for the abbreviated post. Disk Director comes with the ability to create a stand-alone version of the program that can work outside of the Windows environment. This stand-alone version will often be able to perform operations that can't be performed while Windows is running.

First, please check the following. Start DD and go to the Help About menu and check your version and build number. The latest is Version 10.0, build 2,117. If your version is earlier than this then please visit the Acronis web site to download the latest version.

To make a bootable CD requires a CD burner and a blank CD. Start DD and go to the "Tools" menu and choose "Bootable Media Builder". Follow the steps in the Media Builder Wizard to create a CD on your CD-RW drive (assuming that you have one). When the process completes you then have a CD that you can boot your PC from. It will start up into a stand-alone version of Disk Director. You can then try to resize your C partition without Windows getting in the way.

It should also be noted that if you don't have a CD-RW drive you can use the Bootable Media Builder to create a bootable USB flash drive (pen drive, thumb drive).

You should also consider contacting Acronis Technical Support if the software fails to work on your PC. They can often solve these issues by pointing you to a driver download.

 

Oops, I was composing when you last posted. I'm glad to hear that you got it working!

 

So, Bob:

How did you finally get it to work?

 

That's right. Could you share with us how you solved this problem?
Thanks.

 

I think he did in post #6.