Some guidance would be appreciated

This past Christmas, I got a Dell Inspiron notebook and I've noticed that Windows reports my supposedly 80GB HDD as only 70GB.

I'd been thinking of getting DDS for quite a while now, so I just bought and installed it. Well, DDS not only shows my 70GB NTFS Pri Act partition, it also discloses a 5.2GB FAT32 Pri partition ("Concurrent DOS, CTOS"), and a 63MB FAT16 Pri partition ("EISA configuration").

I'm assuming that the two FAT partitions serve Dell recovery purposes, but since I create image-backups of my notebook's HDD, I prefer to free-up those two FAT partitions and have my NTFS partition grow accordingly.

How should I go about doing this in DDS10?

Thanks, pv

 

Hello pvsurfer,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Partition and Disk Managing Software.

Please be aware that it is absolutely safe to delete these Dell recovery partitions using Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0. You can delete them by doing the following:

- Run Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0;
- Choose the partition that you want to delete;
- Choose the Delete option in the Operations menu;
- Follow the Wizard's instructions.

Please also take a look at the section 4.1.10 of Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 User's Guide.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko

 

Kirill~ Thanks very much for your reply, however the link you provided isn't working (at least not at this time). Also, once I delete those two FAT partitions, would you please describe the steps to enlarge my Primary Active NTFS partition (allowing it to realize the maximum possible size)? ~pv

 

Hello pvsurfer,

Please use these instructions to enlarge your partition after deleting of those two partitions:

1. Select the hard disk and a partition to be resized;
2. Select Disk -> Resize or a similar item in the Operations sidebar list, or click Resize/move the selected partition on the toolbar;
3. Follow the Wizard's instructions;

You can find additional information in the section 4.4 of the User's Guide.

Please be aware that you can download Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 User's Guide from the Documentation section of our web site.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko

 

Kirill~ Just to let you know that those documentation links are now working (they were erroring-out for a while there). Thanks for your guidance; everything went well and I'm a happy camper.

On a somewhat related subject (which I'm sure must have been asked several times over), what do you recommend in the way of partitioning a single HDD into multiple logical drives? I've read that quite a few people put their personal data and image files in a separate partition and they also place WinXP;s paging-file in yet another partition. Do you think that's a good idea?

 

Hello pvsurfer,

Actually it will not cause any issues if you choose to place paging files in a separate partition/hard drive.

I'm afraid that Acronis do not have any recommendations on how to partition your hard drive. It depends only on your own goals.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko

 

Ok, let me put it a different way. Assume I partitioned my HDD into 3 logical drives, C:, D: E:... In order for TrueImage to copy the MBR, wouldn't I still have to image the entire HDD, or would TI still capture the MBR if I just imaged the C-partition?

 

Hello pvsurfer,

PLease be aware that if you want the image to contain your hard drive's MBR then you should create this image from the entire hard drive (including all of its partitions). If you backup just the C: partition then MBR will be not included into this image.

Thank you.
--
Kirill Omelchenko

 

If that's the case, I see nothing to be gained by partitioning my HDD.