Another person who can't change partition size ...

I'm running a HP Pavillion ze5300 with a 60 GB Hitachi DK23EA-60 hard drive, partitioned into

C: 19.5 GB
D: 36.3 GB

Of course I'm trying to increase the C partition and I am unable to. I also burnt the software to a bootable CD and I am still unable to change the partition size, it is saying:

Acronis Disk Director was not able to increase the free space on the selected partition. The current size of the selected partition is the maximum possible.

I have created a report and I would love to send it off and get some assistance on this!

Thanks in advance, Aimee

 

Two suggestions from here:

1. Defragment both C: and D: drives in Windows before attempting any partition resizing!

2. I'm not sure how you are resizing C: -- are you using the automated wizards or are you doing it manually? Personally, I prefer to run Disk Director manually so that I'm sure that it will do what I intend. Here's how I would resize (after defragmenting, of course!):

• Right-click on your D: partition and choose Resize
• Make the partition smaller by dragging the left boundary of the partition until it is the desired size. The end result here should be a smaller D: partition and free space in-between C: and D: partitions.
• Commit and then check to see if the operation did what you expected.
• Next, right-click on the C: partition and choose Resize
• Make the C: partition larger by dragging the right border of the partition to incorporate all of the free space
• Commit

Hopefully, that will do what you want.

Before doing anything, backup, backup, backup! Stuff happens....

 

LOL no kidding bad stuff happens

I'll give it a whirl and see how that goes. Thanks!

 

Well I was partially successful.

I had done a backup and did a defrag on both C and D. I ran checkdisk on C and fixed the errors it said I had. And I was able to change the partition size on D and now I have unallocated space at the end.

Unfortunately still no luck on changing the size of C. And I really don't want to reformat the drive and start fresh LOL

 

OK; then you're on your way! You won't need to reformat, just continue with Disk Director as follows.

Try doing this to the D partition. Right-click on it and choose "Resize". When the graphic appears, point to the middle of the graphical representation of the partition and your cursor should change into a 4-headed arrow. Note that the free space is at the end of the partition as shown in the "Before" view of the attached picture.

Click on the graphic and drag the data area completely over to the right-hand side of the partition leaving the free space at the beginning of the D partition as shown in the "After" view. Then click "OK".

Now you have unallocated space in-between the C and D partitions. All you have to do to finish the operation is to right-click on the C partition and this time drag the right border of the partition to make it larger. Don't move the data within the partition; you want to enlarge the boundary of the partition so point to the very edge of the graphic and drag the edge to the right.

That should do it!

 

Woo hoo! Worked like a charm Thanks very much!

Aimee

 

You're welcome!

 

Hey, I'm having some problems when rebooting my machine. It seems to shut down and then it starts the process of restarting Windows then the screen just goes blank and nothing seems to happen after that.

Just curious if anyone can tell me on a partition resizing about how long the reboot should take. I'm Adding space to my C drive from my D drive. I'm increasing D by about 70 gigabytes and adding them to C.

And shouldn't I see some drive light activity during this reboot? I'm not seeing any activity at all on the drives. Thanks!

 

jcerious:

If you shrank D: by 70 GB and it involved relocating data inside the D partition (moving it to the right as pictured in one of my previous posts above), then depending on how much data is being moved it could take a while to complete the operation. You should see disk activity during this time.

If you had 70 GB of free space after the C: partition and are only enlarging the partition by incorporating the free space into it then the operation should complete almost immediately.

Could you describe how you made your changes to the partitions in a little more detail? Did you do it manually?

 

Hey Mark,

thanks so much for your reply!

The 70 gigs is all free space. There is actually 126 gigs of free space in the D partition, so I'm leaving some of it in D. The first time I used the Automatic Wizard. Then after reading your post I did it manually. Basically following exactly your instructions here. Except maybe I slid the slider the wrong way since I had free space

Anyway, I tried your manual method right after I posted my first message here. And it's still in reboot. Basically the screen is blank (it went blank after the Windows restart screen came up for a few seconds), and there is no drive activity at all.

Oh, I should probably tell you this - if I hit the On/Off button on the computer to force it to shut off and then restart it - it brings up the "Your last reboot didn't work..." screen. If I choose Normal reboot it won't boot. I have to choose "Boot from last known good configuration" option for the computer to come back on. But it works fine after that.

Any ideas?

 

By the way I don't know if this means anything, but the C drive icon in the Disk Director Suite appears with a red flag over it.

 

The red flag indicates the partition that is bootable, so that's as it should be.

Three questions:

1. What do you want to end up with?
2. What is your current disk layout? I would have a better idea if you could post a picture; something like the ones in this post.
3. Are you able to boot Disk Director in the standalone mode (from a bootable CD or USB flash drive)?

 

Re: Another person who can't change partition size...

Here's a screen shot of my current configuration. I'd like to put about 100 gbs on C and leave the remainder on D. I haven't tried booting from DIsk Director. Should I try that? By the way, one other thing I should tell you is that I couldn't Copy a partition either. Got the exact same results.

http://putmystuffhere.com/images/disks.jpg

 

jcerious:

OK; the picture of your layout helps me understand your situation better. Let's first try creating free space that you can later add to your C partition.

Try this:

1. Run Windows and start Disk Director (DD) in manual mode
2. Right-click on the D partition in the graphic and choose "Resize"
3. Place your mouse cursor on the handle on the left border of the graphic image of your D partition. The cursor should change into a || shape. Drag the left border to the right until the "Unallocated Space Before" is equal to the amount by which you'd like to increase the size of the C: partition. For example, if C: is currently 14 GB and you'd like it to be 100 GB then the "Unallocated Space Before" should be 86 GB.
4. Click "OK". Your display should now show unallocated space (green) in-between the C and D partitions.
5. Click on the checkered flag to commit.

After this operation completes, check the result. Do you now have a smaller D partition and an unallocated block of free space between C and D? I'm suggesting that you try this part of the operation from within Windows. Since you are not working on your system C: partition you should be able to do this part of the operation while Windows is running and without needing a reboot.

At some point it would be helpful to try running DD in standalone mode. You should do this to confirm that it will work this way. Using DD in standalone mode is helpful when you want to make changes to your system C: partition without interference from Windows.

One final comment; you may eventually need to disconnect your Backup Drive J: before making changes to C: because I notice from your picture that it is a bootable drive and perhaps that is confusing the issue when the PC goes to reboot.

Try the above steps to resize D and post your results back here. Later we'll try resizing C if this first step works OK.

 

Oh man, I thought that was going to work but it didn't! I thought unplugging the J drive might be the key... but apparently not.

Anyway, I followed your directions, and it did force me to do a reboot - even to change D. And no, the D partition size didn't change after I did this before doing the reboot. And it was unchanged afterwards. It seems to force a reboot to do anything. And all of the reboots just hang.

As far as standalone mode, I'm moving soon and just packed up all my writable CDs in a box that I'll never be able to find! So I might have to go out and buy some new ones to do that.

Got anything else up your knowledgeable sleeve!?

I appreciate your help.

 

jcerious:

You don't happen to have anything like Norton GoBack running on your PC, do you? If so, it will act to prevent changes to the partition table, so you'd have to disable it.

If that's not it then at this point I think it's worth seeing if you can run DD10 in the bootable standalone mode. If you don't have any CDs available right now then you use the Acronis Bootable Media Builder to make a bootable USB flash drive instead. That is, if your PC can boot from USB drives.

Try booting the standalone version of DD10 (Full version if possible; if not then the safe version). Choose manual mode and try to resize your D partition again but this time while Windows is not running.

If this is successful, when you reboot into Windows you may see a warning that the hardware has changed. Don't let this scare you. Windows will then resynchronize to the new drive size.

 

Alright, I'll give that a try. I'll have to run out and get some CDs. It won't boot from a USB drive. Thanks so much for your help - and your speedy responses! I'll let you know what happens.

By the way, do you have any idea why it would ask me to reboot when resizing the D partition - like as you said - it didn't effect the C?

 

Maybe there was an open file on D. When I've done this on my disks in the past, usually I can resize D without a reboot but sometimes it asks for a reboot. I'm not positive of the exact reason.

 

Hey Mark,

Great news! I think it's worked! I booted from the Arconis boot CD nd that seemed to do the trick. It's still in progress right now so I can't say for sure, but at least it's. It went through the whole process and now it says the C drive has much more space.

One problem though that could be really major - is that it changed the name of D to E. And it's now calling the old E drive (which is a separate physical drive) D. I thought the software would let you rename these drives and paritions, but now that I've checked it seems to let me change the "label", but not the actual drive letter.

Of course if I can't change these drive letters back it will wreak havoc on my system as it will look for everything in the wrong place.

Do you know how I can change the drive letters back? Thanks!

 

Actually, I just found the Disk/Advanced/Change Letter menu - however "Change Letter" is grayed out, so I'm unable to use it. (It was grayed out when I highlighted either disk).

 

Well, nevermind... once I booted into Windows everything sorted itself out and now everything has the right drive letter! Mark, thank you SO MUCH for all your help! I really appreciate your time and effort.

 

jcerious:

Glad things worked out for you but I still don't understand why the operations did not succeed when running from within Windows.

The reason for the drive letter changes is that when you're booted into the standalone version of DD it is running in a Linux environment and drives are named differently. As you found out, Windows and Linux have different rules for enumerating drives. If you do a lot of this it is recommended that you give each partition a name (label) so that you can tell what's what in either environment. You can do this in Windows by right-clicking on a drive and choosing "Rename".

 

Yep, I figured out how to change the Label when I was panicking over not being able to change the drive letter!

I don't know why it wouldn't work from a Windows environment either. I've got so many things plugged into this computer though I somewhat suspect it may have been a USB storage device that I didn't think to unplug. Who knows? I'm just glad you were around and that you told me to use the boot disk. You really saved me a lot of headaches. If I couldn't have gotten it to work, I would have ended up spending a lot more money and never having things work the way they should. Thanks a lot Mark!

 

aha.......is this possibly the reason why DD10 nor the Paragon equivalent version does NOTHING that I want it to ? No resize, no split etc etc

Many programs say ...turn of virus protection, recovery software etc etc but I have seen no documentation referring to the system status necessary for DD10 to work correctly.

If the above is true then PERHAPS my frustration is near an end ....but I am now very much a doubting thomas.... I am very cautious about doing anything with this product now I have read the forum.....so much can go massively wrong it would seem.

In CD recovery mode the program doesnt even recognize my HDD....it labels a run of the mill western digital 150GB drive with 2 partitions (c&D) as a Roxio 150GB with one partition, with which I can do nothing....not even reformat !! Great.

 

.....I think I have found my answer.....there is a FAQ referring to GOBACK which I had 'missed', probably because I was so darn annoyed.....

FAQ: I have Norton GoBack installed. Can I use Acronis Disk Director Suite?

ANSWER : The problem is that Norton GoBack changes existing partitions type (FAT16, FAT32, NTFS, etc.) into its own format, making them incompatible with existing partitioning software while GoBack is active. This way Norton GoBack prohibits other applications from changing the partition table. So you will need to disable Norton GoBack first if you want to perform any operation (create, delete, resize, split, merge) with partition(s) or to install Acronis OS Selector.

NOTE: When you disable Norton GoBack, you will lose all backup history for the changed partition and will not be able to undo the changes.

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/diskdirector/faq/disable-goback/

hmmm.....patience is a virtue, so they say !!