Cloning a FAT32 (LBA) Partition can't resize

Hi All,

I have 2 HDs, master is OLD drive (12 GB - FAT 32 LBA) and slave is the new drive (80 GB). I want to clone the old drive to new drive and remove old from pc. I booted the Pc with a bootable CD with True Image. I clicked "Clone" and followed the wizard. I see an "x" on top of the source partition which I want to copy and it's not auto resizing nor is it allowing me to manually resize the partition to the new drive. What can I do?

Thanks in advance for your time
E Ortega

 

You said, "I see an "x" on top of the source partition which I want to copy and it's not auto resizing nor is it allowing me to manually resize the partition to the new drive."

True Image will not show a resize when in the window where you have to choose the Source, but when you are in the window where you choose the Destination drive it will show you the entire 80 gigs of the drive. Is it not doing this?

What version and build number of TI are you using?

 

If you look at the user manual on page 47, it gives you a good explanation as to how to do this. User manual can be found on True Image 9 product page. You can read online or download.
I have not tried to clone but have made an image simply by following the instructions. Hope this might help.

 

That "x" indicates that there is something wrong with the partition structure.
I have the same problem with an NTFS partition. Chkdsk /r doesn't fix it. I tried defrag using both the inbuilt Windows version and Diskeeper (current version). I bought Diskeeper since it has an option to check and fix the MBR at boottime - still didn't resolve the issue.

In testing the problem I've deleted all files (including hidden, system, etc) so the partition is totally empty - the problem still remains. Incidentally, PartitionMagic 8.01 also reports problems with my partition. I haven't yet discovered the cause. It appears the only solution may be to delete the partition then create a new partition and reinstall Windows. I would be a little wary about TrueImage being able to create a viable non-corrupt image in this situation (I have corrupt image problems although I'm not convinced they are due to this issue). You could try it but I suggest you also do a normal Windows copy of all your data elsewhere (another disk or CDs or DVDs) before deleting the corrupt partition.

Interestingly, I've had this issue for over a year now and it does not seem to cause any problems with my normal day to day activities. The main problem is the inability to resize the partiton (TrueImage or PartitionMagic). TrueImage also creates sector-by-sector images so they are very large.

I'm hoping to be able to find someway to fix the partition before I have to bit the bullet and reinstall everything. That will be a long, tedious process that I'm not looking forward to.

 

Hello EOrtega and tachyon42,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Please be aware that the most probable reason for the problem you encounter is that your hard drive contains bad blocks. If that's the case then none of the currently available Acronis products will allow you to resize such partition, since it may result in a complete data loss.

However, I would recommend you to create Acronis Report as it is described in Acronis Help Post and then submit a request for technical support. Attach the report created to your request along with the step-by-step description of the actions taken before the problem appears and the link to this thread. We will do our best in order to find out the actual reason for the problem and provide you with the solution as soon as possible.

Thank you.
--
Alexey Popov

 

Hi Alexey,
Thanks for pointing out that the problem may be due to bad blocks.
I guess I should have also mentioned that the summary at the end of Chkdsk does tell me that for my NTFS partition there are bad blocks.

For an NTFS file system information about the bad blocks is recorded in the MFT $badclus metafile and the $bitmap metafile.
In my situation I have used SpinRite 6 to recovery the corrupted sectors which apparently caused the bad blocks in the first place. However, SpinRite 6 does not modify $badclus and $bitmap. Until I can get these corrected I can't be sure that it is the cause of the partition resizing problem.

Of course the issue that EOrtega has with a FAT32 partition can't be exactly the same since this partition type does not have $badclus and $bitmap metafiles. The good news is that if you look at the links below you will see that various users report that PartitionMagic and SpinRite do seem to be able to fix the bad sectors for FAT type partitions.

The issue of resizing and bad sectors has been discussed previously, see link:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=98574
and the link within it:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=82535

Does Acronis have any plans to address this issue for NTFS partitions in TrueImage or DiskDirector?