Program Hung

I am running the latest version of Disk Director Suite under XP Pro. I booted using an Acronis boot CD I made and attempted to move two partitions to another physical drive. Everything seemed to work fine till the very end. Now the screen says 'Synchonizing with the operating system...' and shows 4 seconds remaining. The disk activity light is on solid. The system has been in this state for about an hour and a half. I am afraid to cancel but not sure how long to wait.

If I cancel does it try to roll back the moves? Does it just abort?

Open to any ideas or thoughts!!!

 

I've never known DD to try to synchronize with the operating system when running the recovery version from the CD. I've only seen it do that when running from within Windows. All it is trying to do is to update the registry key HKLM\System\Mounted Devices. It should be safe to stop it, assuming that the copy operation has completed. If the partitions that you are moving are large it may take 1 min or so per Gigabyte for the copy/move operation.

Windows itself should take care of updating the registry key when it reboots, if that's all it is.

 

Thanks for the quick reply. I did reboot and the partitions had finished copying. Acronis however had not assigned the correct drive letters to the moved partitions (in other words had not given them their original drive letters). I rebooted using the DD startup disk and assigned the correct drive letters to the two partitions. I then rebooted but Windows is still showing the incorrect letters. What's the best way to change the drive letters? Can I do that in Windows?

Thanks again.

 

Aha; I think I see what's going on. Drive letters can only be assigned either by Windows or by a program that has access to the Windows registry. I remember trying to assign a drive letter with the recovery version of DD and it failed to do so.

The easiest way to do this is from Windows. You can change the drive letter of any partition except the system partition or one that contains an in-use paging file. Just use the Disk Managment Console to do so.

 

Thank you very much for an early Christmas present! I had visions of restoring from TrueImage and a bunch of hassles but other than this one glitch the partition move worked great.

Changing the drive letters through the disk management console did it!

Again, thanks for your quick help in solving this problem for me.

 

One other question since you've been such a great help so far. I am trying to increase the C partition to create more free space (the original reason for moving the other two partitions off that drive). But DD won't seem to allow me to do that. There's a red X in the top left corner of the C: partition on the DD screen. Not sure what that means.

I now have a 25.1 GB C: partition and 161 GB unallocated partition right after it on the drive. Again, maybe I am missing something basic but I can't get DD to ever allow me to increase the partition size. It always shows 25.1 GB as the max size. I've tried doing it when the following partition is unallocated. I've tried creating a partition and then resizing, but nothing seems to work.

Thanks again.

 

Usually if DD won't let you resize or make changes to a partition, it's because it detects an error.

Have you run chkdsk /f on the C: partition?

Do you have a current backup of the C: partition?

Did you have this problem with C: before you moved the partitions?

Can you post a screenshot of DD in Manual Mode (running in Windows) showing the drives and partitions?

 

I think you may be right. I assume that's what the little red X means. I will run chkdsk /f to correct any found errors and see if that allows me to change the partition size. If not, I'll post a screenshot and keep trying!

Thanks.

 

mekelley:

Glad you mentioned that you have True Image because you may need it. I believe (correct me if I'm wrong, Paul) that DD will never let you resize a partition with bad blocks. So I think instead that you'd have to create an image of the partition, delete the existing partition, and re-create another that is the size you want. Then in order to make sure that the bad blocks on the disk aren't used you would need to do a slow format with Disk Management console or a Windows CD so that the bad blocks on the disk are added to the bad block list, then restore the image.

I've still not fully understood all of the nuances of this procedure, so please correct me if I'm wrong, Paul.

 

Mark,

A TI restore of the image to a different sized partition (either smaller or larger) will not keep the bad sector information.

You can create a partition the size you want before the restore using DD, but TI will delete it and recreate it prior to the restore so there is no need to do a slow format.

However, after the restore, you'll need to run chkdsk /r on the partition so that any bad sectors get marked as bad again. Otherwise, they'll get used.

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I'm not quite sure exactly what "red X" is being referred to. When I look at a partition that has bad sectors, DD doesn't show anything different on the partition. If I try and resize it, though, I get this error message:

Note that nothing is shown on the top left corner of the partition graphic.

If I look at partitions that DD thinks are corrupt or that it can't read correctly, then it shows this:

 

OK; that makes sense. Would another way to fix a disk with actual bad blocks be to back up all of the partitions on the disk and then do a low-level format of the disk using software from the disk's manufacturer? A low-level format should map out the bad blocks in firmware so that they are not used.

I have seen the red C graphic (C for corrupt?) on partitions that are hibernated or are unrecognized. Perhaps just running chkdsk /f or chkdsk /r will fix this on an NTFS partition.

 

My understanding is that today's drives can't be low-level formatted. When bad sectors are found, the drive automatically relocates the sector's data to a spare sector and you don't even know about it. When all the spare sectors are gone, new bad sectors start to show up on chkdsk /r scans.

I would think this might fix it it some cases. However, if the partition was being detected as corrupt when it really wasn't (as in my picture), then running chkdsk to fix it would cause corruption.

I haven't ever tested this as I don't have any corrupted partitions.

 

I had the C symbol show up the other day on a FAT32 partition on a USB flash drive and running chkdsk (without any switches) turned up a couple of errors. Running chkdsk /f fixed the errors and got rid of the C.

Similarly, when messing around with my Linux partition I managed to get the OS to hang and had to power down since it was unresponsive. Afterwards, the root partition had the red C symbol next to it when viewed in Disk Director. Running fsck.ext3 on the partition from a boot disk found and fixed several errors and got rid of the C symbol. So Disk Director must be checking the "dirty" bit on a partition to see if the file system thinks that it has corruption problems.