Can't create new partition

Hi,

My PC is WinXP Home with SP3 and two disk drives. Drive C: is 160 GB, drive D: is 120 GB. I can make a partition in D: using Disk Director 10, but I cannot do the same in C: using either DD10 or GParted Live Cd or Windows. Both drives still have lots of free space. When I attempt to partition C:, either the drive is shown as not having any free space at all, or the partitioning selection is grayed out.

I would appreciate your advice.

 

What build of DD 10 are you using?

Would it be possible to post a screenshot showing the drive?

Do you have the same problem if you boot to the DD CD and try to create a partition on the 160GB drive?

When you say free space do you mean free (unused) space inside an existing partition (C:, for example) or do you mean unallocated space?

 

Hello mudcrab,

Thanks for your reply. I am using installed DD10 Build 2077, straight from the CD that I bought some time ago. By free space I meant unused space; I don't know the difference between free space and unallocated space, please enlightened me.

The problem has been solved and I was just able to partition Drive C: after getting Windows to check the disk for error (GUI equivalent of CHKDSK /F). There was no error. Previously when I first tried partitioning of C: using GParted Live I got an error message about cross-linked file. When I used Disk Management in Windows Drive C did not show and blank, unused space at all.

Cheers!

 

You may want to consider updating to the latest build (2,160).

If you have a partition that's 100GB in size and 20GB is used by your files, there would be 80GB of free space available on the partition.

If you have an 80GB drive and you have created a 40GB partition, there will be approximately 35GB of unallocated space remaining on the drive. Partitions can normally only be created in unallocated space. Some programs will let you take free space from an existing partition and use it to create a new partition. This is done by resizing (shrinking) the partition which then frees up unallocated space for the new partition.

 

Thank you MudCrab for your explanation about the difference between free space and unallocated space. Regarding updating DD10 from the purchased build (2077) to the latest build (2160), do I need to uninstall the original file first?

Thanks for your help.

 

It's generally a good idea to uninstall the previous version/build before installing the new one.

Do you have any other Acronis software installed (True Image, for example)? If so, and it's TI 11 or later and DD is working okay for what you need, you could just leave it as it is. Since the programs use some of the same drivers/programs it seems to work best if they're installed oldest to newest.

 

Hello MudCrab,

Right now I have True Image 8.0 and DD 10. They seem to be getting along just fine. Do I still need to update DD10?

Regards

 

Since it's working for you and you're not running Vista, you can probably just leave DD as it is.

If you do decide to update DD, I would create a current backup image with TI and then you can easily return to your current state if the update has any problems.

For what it's worth, I've updated DD by just uninstalling and installing the new build and it worked fine. That was with TI 10, though.