20 Gb is the maximum for partition C?

Hello,

I just purchased Disk Director 10 and an upgrade from True Image 8 to 11. I hoped that Disk Director would be able to resize two partitions for me quickly.

I have nearly 4 your old Dell Inspiron 510m notebook running Windows XP Pro. My D partition (NTFS) was 27.3 Gb and my primary C partition (NTFS) was 20 Gb. I want D to shrink 15 Gb and C to increase 15 Gb.

Disk Director allowed me to configure the shrink and increase at the same time. The notebook rebooted once and did its thing. The result was a D partition of 12.3 Gb as desired, and a C-partition that remained unchanged. No error messages.

I now have 15Gb of unallocated space sitting between C and D (see attachment). Whatever I try, I keep getting "The current size of the selected partition is the maximum possible"

I tried automatic and manual mode, create an new partition and merge it with C, boot from CD and doing the same thing without Windows. No result.

What can I do? I don't see a reason why I can't increase C with 15 Gb.

Thanks!

 

Is there any jumper at the hdd to limit space to 20GB per partition?

 

Have you checked the C: partition for any errors? DD won't resize a partition with errors or bad sectors.

Do you have a current backup image of the C: partition?

 

Thanks for your replies.

MrMorse: I don't think there's jumper forcing this limit. I never opened my laptop and I'm quite sure that it was delivered to me with a single partition of about 60 Gb (4 years ago).

MudCrab: I just checked for errors and bad sectors using DDS. After that, I was able to shrink C, but not to increase it. I continued trying and created a partition in the 15 Gb unallocated space. I created it as large as possible. However, some unallocated space of 7.8 Mb remained between C and this new partition of 14.99 Gb! Really strange... I created a 7.8 Mb partition as well. Then I used the "increase free space" function on C, taking space from the new 14.99 partition. Taking space form the 7.8 Mb partition was not allowed. I commited the action and the PC rebooted several times. The result should have been a C partition of 34.99 Gb, but this is the actual result: C still 20 Gb, 14.98 Gb unallocated, a 5.4 Mb partition and a 13.8 Mb partition ( in that order). It really drives me crazy! DDS did something totally different then what I asked for.

I'm considering to wipe the whole disk, create a new 35 Gb primary partition and restore the Acronis True Image I made this morning. Should that work? Restoring an image of a 20 Gb partition (probably with some bad sectors) on a 35 Gb partition? I would rather solve it in a different way.

Any suggestions? Thanks for your help!

 

What kind of partitions are there?

What partition is primary?
Are there logical partitions?

 

This is most likely due to partition sector alignment.

When you tried the DD CD, did you also try using the Safe Mode version of DD?

That should work.

My guess would be that the Extended Partition Container is starting directly after the Primary partition (before the unallocated space). Since DD doesn't show this, it's invisible. Perhaps it's blocking DD from expanding the Primary partition, though I'd think it would just move it.

Do you have a screenshot of what Windows Disk Management shows for the drive?

 

MrMorse: the partitions are listed in the image attached to my first post, and the new situation can be seen in the picture attached to this post.

I decided to take the risk and create True Images of C and D, delete the C and D partition, create the partitions again with the desired size and restore the images. I was partly succesful.

Even the unallocted space I was looking at now was splitted in a 20 Gb part and a 27 Gb part. Creating a partition greater than 27 Gb was not allowed! I decided that I should be grateful if I would succeed creating a C partition in the 27 Gb unallocated space. At least a 7 Gb increase!

My first try to restore the image of C in the new 27 Gb partition resulted in a warning from True Image: "The selected partition contains the following error: Run list corrupted. Please note that you cannot change the file system and size of this partition. It is recommended that you check this partition after restoration with your operating system disk tools".

I did not restore it and first ran chkdsk /f /r on C and on D. I noticed that it was deleting corrupted attribute records (whatever that may be) on C. Then I created new True Images. I restored the image of C on the new 27 Gb partition. Succesful this time.

So now I have a 27 Gb C-partition and 20 Gb D partition. It works fine, although I would prefer C to be 35 Gb and D 12 Gb. I anyone has any idea what the error means and how the 20 Gb limited can be exceeded, I would be glad to hear about it.

Thanks!

 

@beekersi
I'm sorry but I have no experiences with the combination of:
DELL-Restore-partition (FAT16), Primary partition, Logical partition, an unknown FAT32 partition and a Acronis-secureZone partition.

BTW:
Personally I would do this:

1. create validated images from "C" and "D".
2. save these images to DVD or an external device
3. destroy all partitions of the 60GB hdd !
4. Restore "C"-image as 35GB partition to the 60GB hdd
5. Restore "D"-image as 25GB partition to the 60GB hdd

The FAT16-, FAT32- and SZ-Partitions are not necessary (in my eyes )

 

Without doing some manual disk editing, you may not be able to get around the problem. Even that may not work.

I agree with MrMorse that the easiest way is probably to create a backup image and then restore the partitions in the order and sizes you want them.

However, I would first create an Entire Disk Image backup (check the Disk # box). You can include the SZ in the backup if you want (it's empty so it won't take up any space).

Remove all partitions from the hard drive so it's all unallocated space.

Then restore the partitions in the following order:
FAT16 EISA partition (don't resize) - Primary
Windows partition (resize as desired) - Primary/Active
Data partition (resize as desired) - Logical
FAT32 (recovery ?) partition -- restore or not, as desired -- Logical
SZ - leave space (if needed) and create a new one using TI