Not able to resize image with dual boot system

Hi,

I'm new to forum and just got latest version of Acronis Disk Director. I have a Dell 410XPS with RAID. I have Windows XP installed on C drive (about 170 MB), and installed Vista on Backup partition (about 60 MB) reported as 'D' (Although drive letters switch based on operating system I'm in. Since Vista is working well now, I'd like to increase partition where Vista is and downsize the XP partition. I installed Acronis sucessfully, and tried to increase size of Vista partition, but after it boots up / restarts a couple times after I commit the operation, nothing happens. I even installed Acronis to the XP partition and nothing happened. I also, started Acronis from CD/DVD, but it can't find hard disks. Any help ?? Thanks, Chris

 

Chris:

That's the problem. Even if you start an operation from Windows, Disk Director has to boot into the recovery environment to finish the operation if you're making a change to the partition in use. If the proper RAID driver is not available in the Linux recovery environment then DD will not "see" your disks and therefore won't complete the resize operation.

There are a few workarounds:

1. Go to the Acronis web site and file a trouble report. Sometimes Acronis will be able to supply you a new set of drivers that will work with your RAID controller.
2. Build a BartPE disk and include your RAID drivers and the BartPE DiskDirector plug-in. If you search on the TrueImage forum for Mustang's BartPE threads you can find information about how to do this. The BartPE environment is a stripped-down version of Windows and should see all of your hardware.
3. Since you've installed DD on both XP and Vista partitions, there is an even easier solution. I've never tried this personally but it should work. Try the following procedure. Here I'm assuming that you have your partitions arranged as [XP] [Vista]:

a. Boot into Vista and run DD10. You should be able to shrink the size of the XP partition without requiring a reboot since XP will not be running at the time. Use the manual mode of DD10 to shrink the XP partition (from the right) and leave free space between the XP and Vista partitions.
b. Boot into XP and run DD10. Expand the Vista partition to the left to incorporate the free space left from step a. This operation might take a while to complete since it will require relocation of the partition contents.
c. Boot from your Vista DVD and repair the Vista installation. This step is necessary because you moved the starting sector of the Vista partition, which is referenced in the new Vista bootloader. To be able to find the new location of the start of the Vista partition, you have to run a repair operation.

After doing this you should have what you want. But before doing anything else, please make backup copies using TrueImage (if you have it) or by other means. Moving partitions around is usually safe but if anything goes wrong you need a way to recover!

 

Chris,

Another thing you can try (if you haven't already) is to boot into the Safe Mode of DD. When you created the DD boot cd, you could choose to include both the Full and Safe Modes. If you didn't include the Safe Mode version on your cd, then create another cd.

The Safe Mode uses a version of DOS and accesses the drives through the computer's BIOS. Lots of times it will recognize the drives when the Full version won't.