Acronis Disk Director Question

The "Disk Director" forum is quiet so I will ask this here. I just came home from Staples with Partition Magic from Norton... from looking at the box (unfortunately too late) it appears it doesn't support Vista (It talks about XP but not Vista.)

So, I looked at the Acronis website and see Disk Director (quite a bit cheaper than the Partition Magic too) but it doesn't say anything about running on Vista either.

I could write Acronis support but it takes them 2 days to get back to you and I really wanted to get this done over the weekend.

Right now I have 33GB on my C drive and 33GB on my D drive. I want to change that - make the C bigger and the D smaller.

The computer I want to do that to is an Acer running Vista Home Basic... can the Acronis Disk Director do that? If so I'll download it now...


Thanks,
Sandy

 

I just "chatted" with Symantec. Nobody on the market can repartition your drives if you have Vista. I'll have to wait...

Bummer.

Just thought I'd pass this along...

 

DD 10 (build 2,160) usually works fine with Vista. I've used it with Vista for a long time. You may have to do a Vista boot repair if you resize a Vista partition, but that's a one-time thing and may not be necessary.

If you have a TI image of the drive, you should be safe trying DD. You can always restore the image if something goes wrong.

Also, depending on how much you need to reduce your Vista partition, you may be able to do it all with Vista's Disk Management. It will let you shrink the Vista partition without even needing to reboot, but there seems to be a limit on the amount (usually about half the size). However, you can't expand to the left, so you'd have to delete the D: partition and recreate it.

The DD forum is a lot less active than the TI forum and Acronis Support only rarely posts there, but myself and several others keep up to date on new posts. Your post wouldn't have gone unanswered.

 

Either Symantec or the person you chatted with doesn't know what they're talking about. There are quite a few partitioning programs that will work with Vista. Also, if you have your Vista partition setup before you install Vista, any standard partitioning program will work fine.

 

Thanks Mudcrab, I guess I should not have believed them... it would be to their advantage if I did NOT go looking for something else.

Okay, I'll try the Acronis DD. I checked out Vista's Disk Management and it seemed limited in what it could do... that's why I looked into purchasing something. Hopefully that will make it easier as well - "wizzards" and the like can be helpful.

Thanks for answering... I wasn't sure how often people "check in" over in that fourm.

I always benefit from reading your responses. Thanks for being so helpful!

Sandy

 

Sandy:
I remember that you had once posted a screen shot of your disk layout in the TI forum. From this, it is apparent that your disk is already set up with the traditional alignment (offset of 63 sectors), so you're good to go. Disk Director will do just fine with your repartitioning task, and you will not need to do any Vista repairs afterwards. Just be sure to run Disk Director from the recovery CD when you are making any changes to Vista's system partition (your C: drive). Like the others have said, the information you got from Symantec was incorrect; lots of us on here are successfully using Disk Director on Vista.

BTW, just to set the record straight, Partition Magic 8 will work fine with Vista under certain limited circumstances. Although it will not install or run in Vista, you can use the bootable CD that runs the DOS recovery version of PM8 on a Vista machine provided that the disk layout is using the older 63-sector offset. It will not work with the newer 2048-sector offset that Vista's partitioning tool (diskpart) creates.

 

Hi Mark! thanks for responding... I remember your helpful tips when working with TI. Since you do remember me I'm sure you recall how "tentative" I was... I'm not real comfortable with tech stuff - but learning everyday. I do find it fascinating yet scary at the same time. I was somewhat in a "rush" to do the repartition because my computer kind of "hit the wall" yesterday due to lack of space on my C drive.

(Not sure what forum to post the following in - hopefully that intimidating Eagle above me won't get upset, "swoop" down and move this...)

Due to lack of "disk space" my Windows mail crashed and freaked (at least that is the explanation my mail program gave me for freaking out.) Thus the trip to the store and the not well thought out purchase of Partition Magic. I used my new Acrnois 11 yesterday to restore from the mail crisis (I wanted to try it anyway because I have a new Dell coming and wanted to make sure everything was good to go) Anyway, when I do a restore from 10 my Norton 360 automatically starts running right after the restore to do a "comprehensive scan" which can take over an hour. You have to let Norton do its thing... and the scan gets longer and longer as the computer gets older. Well, yesterday I did my first restore with 11, Norton did it's scan and it only took 10 minutes! I was shocked! Then I looked at my C drive and I had 4 GB MORE space than before the restore. So, does 11 have some kind of "cleaning" feature built it when you restore?? I saw it had a "Disk utility" feature to clean with but I hadn't even loaded that. Very weird... but nice!

But in regard to DD - I'm grateful I don't need the Vista repair since you remember my "set up." I may have more space on the C drive now but I still don't have enough. You know I had 6GB before the mail crashed - you would think that would be enough space... but I guess my mail did not think so...

You know I run TI from Windows (I have the rescue cd and have made sure I can boot it and see my drives, etc.) but I still run it from Windows.

You are saying don't do that when running DD - run the DD program from the CD? Just wanted to make sure I understand you...

Thanks for the feedback and "hand holding" here... when tyring something new it's nice to know you have "backup" with people who know what they are doing and care!

Sandy

 

Sandy:

No, but when you restore with TI, Vista's System Restore files do not survive the restoration and Windows reacts by deleting them. That's why you ended up with more space after restoration.

Only if you are going to make a change to the partition that Vista is running from. In your case you need to make Vista's partition larger, so you can't do that when Vista is running. Do it from the CD.

 

Thanks for the tips Mark!... I don't know the first thing about repartitioning software. Last night I didn't even put Partition Magic in because I was afraid - I have been BURNED badly by things that aren't "Vista" ready. Heck, I have been BURNED badly by things that supposedly are!

Now that I know DD is safe for Vista I will download it.

You remember that print screen I did to make sure I did not need that Vista repair on my Acer. I had no idea what you were looking at in particular. I am getting a Dell (monday or Tuesday) so do you mind if I print screen that computer so you can tell me if I am "good to go" with TI11. I would rather avoid a problem by taking care of it first. Any kind of "repair" I might need in regard to TI11 (or TI10 - depending which one I use for that computer) as well as DD (if I decide to change the hard drive on that too.) I do have the "specs" on that computer in some email they sent - but maybe you need to SEE it to be able to tell if I'm okay...

Thanks for the help ,
Sandy

 

So I downloaded DD... burned it to CD - booted from the CD - went through the "Add Space Wizzard" and it's currently "processing."

I hope it works! (I am totally having a breakdown right now.)

Keeping my figers crossed....

Sandy (At least this computer works if I crash and burn!)

 

Wooooooooo Hooooooooooo! It worked!

The Super Bowl isn't even over - but I feel like "I" am the winner!

Thanks for the help here - Mudcrab and Mark!

Sandy

 

Sandy:

It's nice to hear a success story for a change; congratulations!

I have a suggestion for you if you want to save some space on your Vista partition. But first, how large is your C: drive now that you've enlarged it? Also, which edition of Vista are you using?

 

I would be happy to hear a suggestion... The C: is now (hold please while I check...) 43.5GB and the D: is 23.1.

The C: is where I doing everything..
The D: is just holding backup data right now.

I may want to change that - but wanted to see if just doing the minor work I did tonight using DD would work.

What I am really getting ready for is the new Dell coming this week. The Acer will be my backup computer (I noticed that is needed if you have Vista - so you have another computer to seek tech help on when Vista whacks out on you.) I really want to think about how I "arrange" everything on the Dell - before I just "load" like I did the Acer without any real thought behind it.

So, any suggestions would be terrific!

Thanks,
Sandy (oh yeah, I have Vista Home Basic on the Acer - the Dell will have Vista Home Premium - so excited to see the aero feature!)

 

Sandy:

The suggestion is to reduce the amount of space used by Vista's System Restore in order to free up more room on the disk. Since you are using Vista Home Basic (and will soon be using Vista Home Premium), you really don't need as much space for system restore points. By default, Vista will use 15% of the disk. On your old layout with C: = 33 GB, that was about 5 GB. On your new layout with C: = 43.5 GB, that is about 6.5 GB.

With Windows XP it was easy to reduce the space using a slider control in a dialog box. On Vista you have to resort to the command line. Here is an article that describes the procedure.

To summarize, you would do the following on your system:

1. Start an elevated command prompt. To do this, click on the Windows (Start) button and type cmd in the search box. The search results will include the program shortcut "cmd.exe". Right-click on this shortcut and choose "Run as administrator". Click "continue" to acknowledge the UAC prompt, and a black administrator command window will open.
2. Type the following "vssadmin list shadowstorage" (without the quotes) followed by "Enter" to see how much space is currently allocated to the Restore Points.
3. To change the maximum storage for your C: partition to 2 GB, which should be adequate for about a week's worth of system restore points, type the following command "vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=2G" (without the quotes) followed by "Enter".
4. You could now repeat step 2 to confirm the change in maximum allocated size.

By doing this you will free up an additional 4.5 GB of space on the C: drive. You can turn off System Restore on the D: drive since you are only storing backups on it. This is done from the control panel. Go to Control Panel > Backup and Restore Center > Create a Restore Point or Change Settings.

I probably don't need to remind you of this, but once you have your new disk layout working the way you want it, make a backup image with Acronis True Image.

 

Thanks so much Mark... I had no idea about any of that. I'm going to print your post out and keep it. It's a great idea!

And yes, actually you did need to remind me - I have yet to backup the new repartition set up... in all my excitement I forgot!

Thanks again...

Sandy