Acronis DDS and Vista Explorer see things differerently

tiscali:

Well, half the battle is won - that's good news.

For installing DD in Vista, did you right-click on the installer program and choose "Run as administrator"? Acronis has not gotten their installer program written correctly yet to ask for privilege escalation in Vista, so you have to force the issue.

Since things are working in XP you should be able to either:

1. Run DD in XP to delete the Vista data partition, then re-create a new partition. Switch to Vista to format the partition and copy your data back.

or,

2. Run TI in XP and create an image of the Vista data partition. It won't matter that you're using TI8 - it should be able to backup and restore an NTFS data partition. Save the image file anywhere but in your target destination partition. Restore the image (while running in XP still) to the same partition and it should realign to a 63-sector offset. Boot into Vista to check the results.

 

Success at last!
Turns out that if you buy DDS 10 online you don't get the lastest version. I went back to the Acronis website and found an update, tagged as Vista compatible. I downloaded this and it installed successfully on the Vista disk.
I then used Disk Director to format the troublesome E: drive labelled 'My Data'. The partition emerged empty and unlabelled but after labelling it all partitions on both disks appeared correctly defined. Vista disk management and Vista Explorer also now see everything as it should be. I've attached screenshots of the two Acronis DD views and of Vista disk management for the record.

My thanks to Mark and Paul for their perseverence in getting to the bottom of the problem. The fix in the end was quite simple. The root of the problem I think lies in the middle paragraphs of post #19 in that an OEM version of Vista Home Edition is likely to screw up if you use its disk management to partition a disk.

Perhaps either Mark or Paul would like to conclude this thread by posting a recommendation to others finding themselves in trouble following a Vista disk partitioning.

Best regards to both and other viewers of this thread from here in the UK.

 

tiscali:

Excellent - those are beautiful pictures with things looking exactly as they should. All of your partitions have 63-sector offset and your drive letters were assigned exactly as expected.

Until the makers of partitioning software catch up I still prefer having a 63-sector offset layout on my PCs. Some day the tools will be able to deal with either layout without issue, but that's not the case today. The 1024-sector offset was created to deal with future large-sector hard disks but as far as I know they don't yet exist, so there is no penalty for sticking with the older layout standard.

Glad this worked out for you. Always glad to help our friends in the UK.

 

Greetings! I'm new here, just googled here over a different problem, I'll probably fix it myself, but if not I'll post it.

What I'd like to say here is:
1) Thank You for saving me from a potentially huge problem, because I was about to use VISTA to repartition a few things (I have a similar setup; Vista Home Premium with split partitions on the original disk, XP Pro with split partitions on the second disk). Of course, I do have backups, but...

2) If I understand this post correctly, the problem arose when the OEM used the 'XP method' of partition offsetting, and repartitioning with Vista will muck it up. However, Microsoft's kb article does not address that; in fact stating the converse - they give the scenario where re-partitioning with XP mucks things up (presumably because they are assuming the original Vista disk was partitioned with 1MB boundaries) as stated in the kb article.

Do I have that right? (Incidentally, 1MB granularity would be 2048 sectors, not 1024, wouldn't it?) So, either XP or Vista could 'cause' the problem, depending on how the disc was initially partitioned. Actually, if you ever restore with TI, since it apparently uses 63-sector offsets, Vista would have a problem with that too. Hmm.

Anyway, thanks much, it's great to read a thread where people are reading the actual problem and trying to solve it, as opposed to just jumping in with a 'common solution' that doesn't really address the problem at hand!

-John

 

That's right. From what I've seen on here (and on the TI forum), you can get in trouble if your disk has a mixture of partition types. Vista Disk Management will want to create new partitions with the 2048-sector offset and XP Disk Management will want to create partitions with 63-sector offset. If you have all 63-sector offsets then you should probably use XP Disk Management Console or a third-party partitioning tool to make modifications. Likewise, if you have all 2048-sector offsets then you should use Vista Disk Management console when making partition changes. Third-party partition managers like Acronis Disk Director can work with a mix of offsets without problems, but when viewed by Windows Disk Management the results may look odd.

That is correct; I don't know how I messed that up and, unfortunately, the forum software will no longer let me edit the posts with this error. Drat.

That would appear to be the case.

Vista works fine with 63-sector offset but when using Vista Disk Management to create new partitions on the disk then you may end up creating a disk with mixed offsets and leading to the issues described here.