TrueImage 11 cannot repartition drive with a red C on it

Keep in mind we deal with a high number of nearly dead or failing drives, so mostly likely the C stands for corrupt. But how to fix it?

How do I figure out where in the MFT or the MBR I need to look at so that it will allow me to resize the drive/partition properly. See examples.

http://www.jadnetworking.com/stuff/Acronis_11_1.jpg

http://www.jadnetworking.com/stuff/Acronis_11_2.jpg

http://www.jadnetworking.com/stuff/Acronis_11_3.jpg

 

so far, to try and fix it, I've ran chkdsk before attempting to clone.

sometimes it finds problems and fixes them, other times it doenst, but the C doesnt go away.


In Disk Director I tried expanding the parition and increasing disk space. Always fails with a "Cannot do this on a bad drive" error message.

message not exact, but I cant remember it verbatim

 

TI and DD won't do resizing on "corrupt" partitions or partitions with bad sectors. If you need to do a resize, you'd need to delete the partition and recreate it the size you want (this will delete all the data on the partition). You will then need to run chkdsk /r on the partition to mark the bad sectors bad again.

 

problem with that is a lot of the time, the drives are in bad enough shape that we basically get one crack at it.

also, deleting the partition on the original would be pointless if were trying to clone it to a new drive due to the original drive failing.

 

Are you having the problem on the restored partition (the partition on the new drive)? If so, you should be able to do the resize during the restore to bypass the "corrupt" problem.

You would image the drive or bad partition and then restore it (with resize) to a good drive.

I guess I'm not understanding why you're trying to resize a partition that has known corruption and is on a drive that's bad or going bad. That's just asking for problems.

 

If these are bad drives, what I think you want to do is make a backup image of the entire drive. Then you can restore the image to new drive and adjust the partition size at that time. There's no need to make any corrections to the bad drive - just get an image. This is what MudCrab was saying.

Gibson Labs Spinrite may be a tool that you need to use on drives that are in such bad shape that you cannont create an image.

 

in most cases, creating an image doesnt work. Either the entire image is corrupted and unuseable (when I try and extract to a new drive, Acronis says the image is bad) or when the image is placed back on the new drive, it is so corrupted, I cant even repair the OS install

 

I tried this.

created an image, then put the image on a new drive

1. from the get go it wouldnt let me expand to fit the rest of the drive.

2. after expanding to the original partition size, and going into disk director on the new drive, it still says the parition is corrupt and wont let me expand it.

so whatever corruption occured on the original drive, is also inside the image, and on the new hard drive with that image

 

Have you tried imaging from outside Windows, by using the Rescue CD?

Colin

 

yes. one of the first things I tried hoping inside Windows was somehow causing the problem