Disk Director 10 and Vista - Repartitioning Problems

I have a 320Gb HDD in my laptop running Vista SP1. It is divided into 3 partitions - C: (Boot partition; NTFS format), D: (Data; NTFS partition) and E: (Recovery; FAT32 partition). I am trying to use Disk Director to take some of the space (50Gb) from C: and add it to D:. There is more than sufficient free space on C: to enable this transfer.

I installed Disk Director Suite (10.0, build 2160) on my laptop and went through the process of selecting which partition I wanted to increase and which partition I wanted to take it from. Everything seemed to go OK and committed and then rebooted. The boot up sequence indicated that it was analyzing, locking and then checking partitions. It then came up with an error indicating that it was unable to proceed. (I don't remember seeing any error code). I rebooted and found no changes made to my partitions.

I created a bootable disc and tried the same repartitioning. When I tried using the "Full" version of Disk Director, it was unable to find my hard drive. When I tried using the "Safe" version, everything seemed to be going OK until I committed to the change. The box came up showing the state of progress, but nothing happened. I left it running for over an hour (in case it was very, very slow), but no progress bar appeared and it seemed to be doing nothing. I rebooted and repeated the attempt at repartitioning, and it still seemed to freeze.

Can anybody please advise how I can resolve this issue and repartition my drive?

Many thanks in advance for your help.

 

plusman:

Running from the boot CD is the best choice when making any change that will affect the Vista system partition, as you've discovered. Also, be aware that Disk Director may refuse to make changes if there are any bad sectors in the partition or if there is any file system corruption. So check your disk first:

a) Go to "Computer", right-click on the C disk and choose "Properties"
b) Click on the "Tools" tab
c) Under "Error Checking" click "Check Now"
d) Put a checkmark in both boxes and proceed
e) A disk check will be scheduled for the next reboot
f) Repeat steps a-e for the remaining disks
g) Reboot and allow the disk check to finish. This may take a long time.

Now for the partitioning. Have you tried doing it one step at a time? I would try this from the boot CD running in safe mode:

1. When Disk Director starts, choose manual mode
2. Right-click on the C (boot) partition and choose "Resize"
3. On the graphic image, drag the right border of the partition to the left until the partition is 50 GB smaller in size and there is 50 GB of uncommitted free space to the right of the C partition.
4. Click on the checkered flag to commit.
5. Check the result and confirm that you have 50 GB of uncommitted free space between the C and D partitions.
6. Right-click on the D partition and choose "Resize"
7. Drag the left border of the graphic image to the left to expand the size of the D partition. Make sure that you end up with the D partition 50 GB larger in size and no uncommitted free space before or after the partition
8. Click on the checkered flag to commit.
9. Verify that the result is what you wanted.
10. Now reboot into Windows.

 

Also, I would suggest using a good defrag tool, such as PerfectDisk, to defrag the drives before repartitioning.