DD10 won't resize a partition

F and G were on my second disk... WD 500 GB SATA. F is 419.2 GB, G was 46.58 GB. Used DD10 to delete G. Now the disk has only F plus 46.58 GB unallocated immediately adjacent to F.

When I try to resize F in manual mode, DD10 says both minimum and maximum size is 419.2 GB. It simply won't resize. Same problem in automatic mode with Increase Free Space Wizard (unallocated partition does not appear in list of available partitions on second disk, and if I continue anyway, it says "The current size of the selected partition is the maximum possible".).

F and G were both created by XP-Pro/SP2 Computer Management >> Disk Management as NTFS partitions with 4 KB cluster size.

Of course, partitions larger than 419.2 GB are certainly possible. DD10 is also looking right at a Firewire drive that is 500 GB nominal, one NTFS partition, 4 KB cluster size, 465.8 GB actual.

This is about as simple as things get. What is wrong with this picture?

 

milo47:

You're right; that is about as simple an operation as you can get. Just a long shot, but after you deleted the G partition to create free space did you then click on the checkered flag to commit the operation?

Will DD10 let you resize F at all? Can you try shrinking F a little bit to see if that works?

As a grasp at a last straw, what happens if you zero the contents of the free space (Wipe) and then try again?

From what you're describing this should work.

 

Yes, I had indeed committed the deletion of G. Even XP recognizes it as unallocated. Following your suggestion, I wiped the unallocated space after F, which helped not at all. DD10 still claims F minimize size = maximum size = 419.2 GB. It will let me move F back and forth, allocating G's former 46.58 GB before/after F... but resizing appears to be impossible.

Looks like I'm stuck. Guess I'll have to reformat drive 2 as 500 GB nominal and reload F data. Avoiding this sort of thing is why I bought DD10 in the first place!

Does Acronis technical support read this forum? Is there any way to submit this problem directly to them?

 

milo47:

You must be running into some kind of partition size limitation. I don't have a disk that large to test this on so I can't confirm if it's a bug in DD10 or not.

Acronis seems to very rarely show up here lately. You can contact them directly for assistance by going to the "My Account" area on their website and choosing "Report a Problem with my Product".

Before you reformat the drive you could try the operation with gparted. You can download it here: Gnome Partition Editor .

You would want to download and burn the LiveCD version and boot from it. Or you could use the LiveUSB version on a USB flash drive. It's probably taboo to mention other partitioning software on this forum but gparted is an open-source program and not a commercial competitor, and Acronis seems to not be responding to users here lately, so I'll risk offending the moderators by posting this link.

 

Mark,

Thanks so much for trying to resolve this issue. I've submitted it to Acronis technical support, and we'll see what happens after Christmas. If they drop the ball, or if DD10 is simply incapable, then I'll try your suggestion and let you know how it goes. Happy Holidays!

...Milo47

 

There might be a problem with the F partition.
I've had such a problem which I prevents me resizing a partition using PartitionMagic 8.
TrueImage 9 clone mode will not allow manual or auto partition size change when cloning to a larger drive if there is a problem with the structure of a partition.
Maybe similar code is being used in DD10.
In my situation TrueImage 9 forces a 'sector by sector' image creation.
It also displays a small X icon at the top left of the graphical display of the partition (doesn't immediately appear but only after some operation is done where TrueImage has processed the partition).
Do you have TrueImage?
Does it create a normal image or also 'sector by sector'.
Try chkdsk /f - it might fix a problem but even if it doesn't show any problem that's no guarantee that there really isn't a problem with the F partition. Microsoft acknowledges that chkdsk will not detect all partition structural problems.

 

This problem appears to be resolved. Acronis technical support suggested trying again from Standalone DD10, which resized (and committed) in about 10 seconds. IOW, resizing works under standalone but not under WinXP.

However, I noticed two things afterward:

1. When I rebooted into Windows, it found new hardware (didn't say what) and requested another reboot. Is that typical after resizing a partition to fill an entire disk?

2. I ran CHKDSK, which found and fixed a few minor errors. That's probably just left-over junk rather than DD10 artifacts. Then I analyzed the resized partition with PerfectDisk8 and noticed that the MFT was not fragmented. Doesn't that seem odd... after resizing from 419.2 GB to 465.8 GB?

Of course, I did full backups before this operation, and I'll watch things carefully for a few days. However, so far, so good. Thanks to all for your suggestions and observations.

 

milo47:

That makes sense. Since you performed a resizing operation when Windows was shut down, then upon reboot the disk would have a new UUID. Windows detects that and synchronizes to the new disk size and identifier. If your resizing had been successful when running DD10 from within Windows then it would have synchronized as the last step of the commit operation. Anyway, that's the way it has behaved when I've resized NTFS partitions on my drive.

If chkdsk found errors then that was the root cause of the problem. Acronis TrueImage will put up an informative error message when there are problems with the disk and will then refuse to restore to a partition with defects to prevent data loss. It would appear that DD10 can detect problems before doing operations but they must have forgotten to display an informative error message. Instead the operation is not performed. That sounds like a bug.

 

Same problem here, with a backup of a 21GB Windows partition (using ATIH 10.0.4942), on restore it will only show 21GB (both minimum and maximum) and nothing can change it. The drive is 80GB (Samsung), works fine, but the Windows that is restore will not boot; it goes from "Loading personal settings" directly to "Logging off." This is with DD 10.0.2160

 

Dell Laptop?