Unallocated space.......what to do????

I use my 2nd HD e: (internal) strictly for backups (ATI 9.3677). I noticed that I have some "unallocated" space on my 2nd HD. Have no idea how it got there. How do I merge this useless space back into my e: drive. There is nothing on this 2nd HD but imaged ATI files. I keep these on my 250 gig 2nd HD for historical purposes and if I should require a recovery I could the most appropriate image to restore with.

This unallocated space does not show up in windows disk manager, I only noticed it in ATI "add new disk" (I was just playing), and "clone disk". On checking properties it did not match up in properties when compared to my c:drive. Both these drives are identical. In properties the total disk space did not match thereby comfirming what ATI displayed, that in fact there was space unnaccounted for and was only visible when viewing "add new disk" or "clone disk" and not visible in disk manager.

Bottom line is I want to merge this unallocated back into my e: drive.

Any help would be appreciated.....thanks

 

Enlarge an other partition. In the following dialog it should show you the unallocated space as the amount of which you can enlarge the partition.

 

"Enlarge an other partition."?.......where do i find this?

Thanks

 

Sorry, wrong word.
Resize an other partition, make it bigger/larger. My english is terrible at 2 o'clock in the night.

 

Hello,

Thank you for using Acronis Disk Managing Software

To max0071:
In fact you need to create a partition from this unallocated space and then just to merge it into any partition you like.

Thank you
--
Alexander Gladkov

 

Easy for you to say?

 

Why not directly resize the partition above the unallocated space? Works also, if i remember well.

 

Could you please describe a problem you are experiencing?
There is a wizard for every operation i suggested so you should not have a problem.

Thank you
--
Alexander Gladkov

 

See post #1

 

Hello,

I'm sorry, i did not noticed, you may use Acronis Disk Director 10 Suite to create and merge partitions.

Thank you
--
Alexander Gladkov

 

Hello max0071,

Try the following:

- Use TI's Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard to create a Secure Zone on your 2nd hard drive. When prompted, do NOT accept the default option to activate the Acronis Startup Recovery Manager.
- Once the Secure Zone has been created, use the Manage Acronis Secure Zone Wizard again to remove the Secure Zone and return the space it used back to the partition it was previously taken from.
- Reboot the system and check whether that mysterious unallocated space has now been merged into the partition.

Regards

 

max0071,

The method proposed by Tommy is to create an image of the E: drive and then restore that image to the original location as a partition restore with resize. To perform a partition restore you do not check the Disk X box, only the proper partition beneath. This restoration mode gives you, in the following wizard steps, the option to resize the partition being restored and you would choose to resize it to full disk capacity.

I personally favour that method because it uses the TI restore functionality we are all familiar with, but considering that your E: drive now probably holds several large .tib files already, that approach would be more time-consuming than the one suggested by Menorcaman. Besides, you would need an appropriate storage location to store the image of the E: drive on, until restore with resize accomplished.

 

thanks menorcaman and bvolk.......will try your suggestions...much appreciated

 

On attempting to implement Menorcamans suggestion I got the following:

"Acronis True Image Home was not able to create Acronis Secure Zone on the selected drive."

As I previously mentioned my OS operates on my C: drive and my E: drive where the unallocated space resides holds my archived image files only.

 

I think the easy way is to install a soft which handles partitions, like Acronis Disk Directory. With this you can resize your partition E and add the unallocated space. Its simple with the apropiate tool.

 

Thanks Tommy I'm reading about Acronis Disk Director to see if it does what I need. I guess I could accomplish this by downloading the trial version, cause I doubt (I hope) this is a one time event.

 

The unallocated space not showing up in Disk Management is suspicious.

What are the values for the E: drive total size (as seen by Windows) and the unallocated space size (as seen by TI)?

Watch the multiplier (1,024) when you convert Kilobytes into Megabytes into Gigabytes to see if the E: size and unallocated space add up to 250 GB.

 

Disk E Properties

Used Space 234,151,276,544 bytes
Free Space 15,897,202,688 bytes
Capacity 250,048,479,232 bytes

Disk C Properties

Used Space 18,411,618,304 bytes
Free Space 231,645,085,696 bytes
Capacity 250,056,704,000 bytes

Computer Management/Disk Management

Disk 0 232.88 NTFS
Disk 1 232.88 NTFS

Both show as "Primary Partition"

ATI-Clone Disk & Add a New Disk

Disk 1 232.9
Disk 2 232.9........................7.844 MB Unallocated Space

This is the bar graph in Clone Disk and Add a New Disk

As you can see under properties there is a difference in Capacity. Please remember the C: & E: are both identical HDD. The difference does not show up in Disk Management, it only shows up in ATI (Clone Disk and Add a New Disk) where it shows up in the bar graph of 7.844 MB of Unallocated Space.

 

That same amount of unallocated space (or was it 7.888 MB ?) appeared on my system drive after I created a new partition D: by first restoring C: with downsizing. In my case too, it didn't show up in Disk Management, being too small, I guess. It was visible, though, on the destinations screen in TI Recovery.

I didn't bother. Someone even stated, that such an amount of unallocated space was required (or good to have), but my two other single-partition drives never had any. And now that I have a third partition on the system drive the small unallocated space is gone from there as well.

That unallocated space on your E: is too small for the SZ to be created in, the minimal size of the SZ being some 25 MB, if I remember well. Imaging the E: partition and then restoring it with resize is probably not an option either, due to the great amount of used space.

 

That "unused" space (7.844 MB) appears at the beginning on ANY logical partitioned HDD. It is the "green line" as seen in XP drive management window.

If you have 1 primary and 3 logicals on a drive there is 1 "unused" area at the beginning of the 3 logical drives.

It does not matter what size the HDD is, there is always 7.844 MB of unused space at the first instance of a logical drive. The "lost" space is equal to 5.447 floppy disks, don't mess with it - it has to be there.

 

@mrtee:
Could it be that you are mixing this up with the logfile size which each partition has? They have arround 8 MB. But those won't show up in a partition diagram as unallocated space, but in the properties of a partition.

IMHO the unallocated space is actually set aside by Windows when you format an ntfs drive in anticpation of you perhaps changing it to a dynamic drive in the future. This is a special windows extension that allows you to, among other things, create dynamic volumes for RAID configurations. If this is not the case you can kill this unallocated space by resizing the above partition. I have done so months ago i think (to be sure i will have a look right now) and i have no problems.

I had this unallocated space one time because i had BootIT installed and forgot to resize my partition from which i stole 8 MB for BootIT after i deinstalled BootIt..

 

As has been stated already, that small amount of unallocated space is the normal outcome of Windows creating and formatting NTFS partitions. Although this amount of unallocated space is insignificant, I've used Acronis Disk Director Suite a number of times to merge the unallocated space into a system partition without subsequent problems.

Regards

 

From what I have here it would appear that just formatting a new drive (without partitioning it) does not produce that small amount of unallocated space, while further partitioning and formatting the added partition does.

Does that fit?

Not having software of Disk Director reputation and reluctant to trust a free program of this kind (which also seems rather complicated to operate, with some parameters involved I never had to set before), I simply merged the unallocated space by resizing the last partition with TI. So far so good, but it's early to say more in my case.

 

Hi Max please be carefull, I tryed to merge free space a number of years ago, and ended up removing the FAT (file allocation table) then nothing would reboot.

 

Tommy, here is the screen shot of DD.