Unallocated space.......what to do????

Thanks everyone for their input.......but since it is really an insignifigant amount of space I think I'll just leave it.........but I sure would like to get rid of it......but I'm afraid to.

thanks

 

Be not afraid! You have backups? You have tested them? You know that they work?
So merge, amalgamate or whatever and if you are not happy with the result boot from the Ti recovery CD and put every thing back to square one.
Of course this proposal is a lot less worrysome if you have a spare drive to restore to.

Xpilot

 

mrtee,

Referring to your DD screenshot:

- which of the unallocated space instances do appear on the destinations screen in True Image Recovery wizard?

- which tool did you use to format drives 4 and 5 ?

 

@mrtee
As told before, those 7.844 MB unallocated space are totaly useless if you don't run a dynamic drive. Murge it or leave it as it is. Disc 1 = 112 GB unallocated space For a new OS?

 

I don't have Bart to help me and it takes me over 2 hrs to restore......so I'm reluctant to play, but thnx for the encouragement.

 

All of the partions (except for 1-2 Vista) were done with DD 10 and or earlier versions of the same.

Unallocated on HD 1 for new OS, yes. Or for moving some things around. My son in law needed a new HDD so I took out what I had there and put in a 250 GB drive that I had just received that day.

The same unallocated space shows in TI 9 at the same locations.

 

My two drives (one internal and one external) that had been formatted new with Disk Management (leaving them at single partition, as they came out of the box) do not display any unallocated space in the destinations screen in TI9.

So there seems to be some difference in the outcome depending on whether you set up a new drive with Disk Management or with DD.

 

I'm not 100% sure but I believe the unallocated space is only created if the HD is fdisk'ed (partitioned) prior to NTFS formatting. Please correct me if this isn't the case.

Regards

 

I stand partially corrected. The 7.844 MB unallocated space is apparentley created only at the beginning of a HDD when it is formatted as a logical drive.

I created a small FAT32 partition on disk 1 using Disk Managment, no space. Did the same as NTFS, no space. The results were the same using DD.

At this point I will presume that the 7.844 MB space is reserved so that if the disk is ever reformatted as a primary that the space that will be used for the MBR will have had nothing written to it.

Whatever the reason I will leave it as created and not mess with such a small % of total space on a disk.

 

That would fit my case.

With the addition that resizing down the existent partition (by means of TI) and then creating the additional partition in the resulting unallocated space using Disk Management creates that small unallocated space as well.

The poor man's DD.

 

Yes indeed .

One can also create an additional partition without data loss by creating an Acronis Secure Zone of the required size (don't activate the Startup Recovery Manager!!), then using Windows Disk Management to delete it and to create a new partition in the resultant unallocated space. Very useful for those without a non-destructive disk partitioning utility .

Regards

 

Yes, that's also a faster method if the partition to be resized has a great amount of used space.

But do I hate those blue screens flashing!