Cannot reclaim unallocated space?

I have just bought Disk Director Suite 10 to hopefully sort out a problem created by Partition Magic 7.
I have 3 drives with one primary partition and the others being logical partitions for backup purposes. I have ended up with unallocated space on each drive. I have tried to reclaim this space back into the adjacent partition with DDS10 without success.
I have carried out a disk scan for windows XP and defragmented the drives.

It is very frustrating can anyone help with a simple procedure for fixing this?

Thank you.

 

Is it possible to post a screen shot of the DD10 window showing your current partition layout? Something like the first picture in post #3 of this thread would be helpful to see. When you create the screen shot, please do it with DD10 in the "Manual" mode.

Also, is your PC capable of booting from the rescue CD version of DD10 and does it see all of your disks correctly when you run the "Full" version?

 

Image attached:

I have not attempted to boot from the CD.

 

OK, so I assume that you just want to get rid of the 7.8 MB of unallocated space at the beginning of Disk #2?

PM and some other partitioning tools will sometimes leave a small amount of unallocated space in front of the first primary partition, and I'm not sure of the exact reason. I think it's to allow room to easily insert a new partition in front of your current one, but there's no reason why you can't delete it -- I usually do.

The simplest way to do this is to run DD10 in Windows. Since you won't be working on your Windows partition on Disk #1 then there is no need to boot into the recovery version of the program.

Start DD10 in "Manual" mode and then right-click on the "Audio 2" partition on your Disk #2. Choose "Resize". Drag the left side of the partition boundary to the left until there is no free space left, or just type a "0" in the "Unallocated Space Before" box. Make sure that both the "Unallocated Space Before" and "Unallocated Space After" boxes are zero so that you completely fill the partition. Then click on the checkered flag to commit.

Since you have 31.22 GB of data in the partition it may take a while to move it all.

 

hemmick reef,

I'm confused. Your graphic doesn't match your description. You only have one logical partition and you don't have unallocated space on each drive.

 

Hope you don't mind a few smilies...my emotions are running high with all of this

Sorry for the mistake in my post. Drive letter H was unallocated and I managed to change it to a primary partition to hopefully merge it with 'C:'.......................that's when my problems really began!

I tried to merge C & H which I hoped would be straight forward. It asked me to create a backup folder which I did (this is probably where I made the mistake), because when the computer finished and rebooted a message came up saying 'Non System Disk - press any key'
It took me six hours last evening which was saved only by a recovery disk (simple version of Norton Ghost) that came with my computer which gave me an option to recover a file or two from D drive.

This partitioning software is not for the faint-hearted that's for sure and I am not convinced if I really need to use it in the first place now?

 

hemmick reef:

OK; I'm starting to understand better what you're trying to do. The more detail you supply the easier it is to figure out what went wrong.

Personally I don't trust the automatic "merge" operation in partitioning software to do the right thing. It's supposed to copy files from one partition to another and then resize. Instead I prefer to do this step-by-step and check each operation before proceeding to the next step. Here's what I'd do.

First copy any files on H: to your C: partition on Drive #1 using Windows (although it sounds from your description like the H: partition may already be empty).

Then delete the H: partition leaving it as unallocated space between your C: and D: partitions.

Next, reboot into the recovery version of DD10 to make changes to your Windows (C) partition. You must verify that DD10 sees your drives correctly when running the recovery version. If it doesn't, the operations will not succeed. Hardware support in the recovery environment differs from the Windows environment. Hardware is supported by Linux drivers (full mode) or DOS drivers (safe mode) and some newer hardware may not be supported. You must check yours before proceeding. Boot into the recovery disk and try the "full" mode first. If that doesn't work then try the "safe" mode. If you can see your disks OK then proceed to the next step.

Finally, expand the C: partition to the right to incorporate the adjacent unallocated space. Choose "manual" mode of operation and then right-click on the C: partition. Drag the right side of the partition boundary to the right until the "Unallocated Space After" box shows "0". Make sure that both the "Unallocated Space Before" and "Unallocated Space After" boxes are zero so that you completely fill the partition. Commit and reboot.

 

Thanks for the advice.

I have it sorted now, but what happened when I tried to start windows and it said -'non system disk'.

If I had no backup utility what could I have done?

 

hemmick reef:

I can only guess what happened since you haven't described what you did. The "non system disk" error message is generated by trying to boot to a FAT32 partition that is not bootable. So either the partition boot record was damaged or the wrong partition was active.

Running DD10 in the recovery mode could have fixed the non-active partition (if that was what was wrong). Booting from a Windows CD and using the recovery console could have fixed the partition boot record (fixboot command).

 

I need to read the manual a bit more deeply.

Thanks