Finally able to increase space in primary partition

It took about 2 weeks but I was finally able to increase space in my primary partition. My situation was this: Two disks: 20 gb containing XP Pro SP2 with one C partition and a 200 gb containing application programs and data with several partitions, dual booting XP and Vista. I purchased a 150 gb Raptor drive and wanted to use it to replace my 20 gb drive but increase space to 30gb. After stumbling around for several days and getting very frustrated with TI 10 and DD 10 I hadn't made much progress being new to Acronis software. I then came to this forum and asked for help. I was told what to do for my exact scenario. I cloned the C drive to the Raptor drive but immedately ran into boot problems when I tried to boot from the Raptor drive. Apparently the boot data was not brought over with the cloning. After finally figuring out how to use the XP Repair Console I was able to get through this problem. A freeware product called VistaBootPro was also very helpful. Finally able to dual boot again with XP Pro on the Raptor drive. Again I got very frustrated because after spending several days trying to increase space on C drive I was getting nowhere. No matter what I did it seemed like I was locked into a 20 gb drive. Even using a rescue disk and BartPE didn't help. Asked the forum again and was told to check the disk for errors. Geez, never thought about doing that. Sure enough after using Chkdsk I discovered that the partition had file attribute errors. Once these errors were fixed I was able to increase the size of the partition with just a click of the mouse. That was easy, right. I am now dual booting again with a 30 gb XP partition and a 40 gb Vista partition both on my Raptor drive. I attribute most of my frustration in learning how to use the Acronis products. But Acronis could have helped by making me more aware of some pitfalls like not including auto verification when using TI, removing InCD and problems moving boot data during cloning just to name a few. But I couldn't have done it without the help of this forum and I especially want to thank Mudcrab for all the help. I now feel more comfortable with Acronis products. Somewhere during above process I wiped out all my music in the M partition. But fortunately I was able to restore from a backup quite easily. Just wanted to share this with all the frustrated folks out there and hope it helps.

 

ralph926,

You're very welcome. I also wish DD was updated to tell you why it can't perform a particular function. About the only thing it will tell you is if you try to resize a partition with bad sectors, otherwise you're on your own to guess.

I haven't tried to clone a dual-boot XP/Vista setup that uses Vista's boot manager, but I'd guess that the process "broke" the drive connection and that is what required the repair.

Hopefully, TI and DD will be completely Vista compatible soon.