DD10 won't Split

I found a few posts on problems with splitting a partition, but none seems to describe my particular problem.

DD 10.0.0.2160, being run from CD, Full version in Manual mode.

Computer has 3 physical PATA drives:
1: 80GB split into C: and D:
2: 80GB E:
3: 400GB F: (less than half full)

All partitions are NTFS (PC is running XP).

My objective was to split drive 3 into two partitions, ultimately creating a new small drive G:.

I tried several times to split partition F:, both with and without moving a couple of files, and with different (legitimate) free space allocations. Each time the same thing happens. The program steps me through the expected dialogs, gets to (what I think is) the last dialog window, I click OK, and nothing has happened! There are no pending tasks to view, the Commit button is non-operational, and the GUI has not changed in any way.

I have so far had no other problems with DD (other than a separately posted performance issue), and it seems to be recognizing everything correctly on the 3 drives. It just ignores my attempts to split that partition.

I realize that there is a simple workaround that I've in fact just finished performing, and that worked without problem. I resized the partition down, then created a new partition in the newly freed-up space. A "manual split" if you will.

But reason for posting is to try to find out for future reference if there is a problem with the Split operation.

 

OzRon:

This may not be very helpful but the operations "Split" and "Merge" involve multiple steps that include copying data from one partition to another. I avoid these like the plague. There are too many opportunities for data loss if something goes wrong.

The way that you solved the problem is the way that I prefer; it just seems more natural to do this operation in three steps. First, make one partition smaller (Resize) and second, create a new partition in the newly-unallocated free space. Third, copy any data from the old partition to the new partition.

If you do it step-by-step you will get to confirm that the desired outcome will be achieved by checking the results of one step before moving to the next step.

This is just a personal preference of mine.

One possible explanation for your result is that sometimes you may be unable to resize a partition if it contains data near the end of the partition. Defragmenting the partition before resizing can move this data away from the end of the partition, allowing the resize to succeed. You'll discover this if you do the steps manually. But if you start the "Split a partition" wizard, it will do the steps listed above automatically. But the outcome is uncertain if one of the steps could fail. Since I've never attempted a split with DD, I don't know how it will react if the first step fails. Perhaps this is what happened.

 

Thank you k0lo/Mark. I appreciate your comments.

We're in agreement on how to achieve the desired result. But it still seems strange that a facility that is supposed to be available (and that features in advertising and reasons to upgrade) just doesn't work. I would have thought that perhaps Acronis might have jumped in here by now with something other than how to ignore the problem.

I also understand an appreciate your "data-at-end-of-partition" comments. But I doubt if that was the issue on this occasion, since there were no problems with resizing the partition to make room for the second one - and it did it quite quickly.

Thanks again.