Will ATI be able to resize a partion when I mount an image back to that partition?

I've got a dual-boot XP system. The C, boot drive, is the xp-upgrade to Windows 98se. When I 1st purchased XP, which was ages ago, I didn't know any better and as I had the 09se "C" drive at 10 gig, I just upgraded it to XP, which was almost full immediately. Since I had a 2nd 250 gig HD installed at the time, M$'s solution was to just add XP in again as a clean install to the 1st partition of the 2nd drive (drive H), 2 of the same XP's as a dual boot. As I use the clean install of XP and never use the upgrade on the C drive except to boot, I need to resize that 1st partition (100 GB) of the 2nd drive to about a 1) 30GB partition for XP, 2) a small partition exclusively for the scratch disk files from my image manipulation software 3) and then 3) the rest for an extra logical partition. .....

If, I 1) clone this 2nd hard drive to another drive as a temporary backup ( I guess I can do this if I unplug the CD and install the 3rd "clone-to" drive in it's place as I have my DVD burner which I can use ATI). 3) make an ATI image from this 100 GB partition (which there's only about 20 GB on that 100 GB drive) to another partition. 4) Reformat the H-drive, Then since I've got a back-up 2nd drive, and an ATI image on another partition of the original drive, reinstall the ATI image----but will ATI allow me to resize that logical drive 100GB partition (with an OS on it [but not the boot partition]) ----to 3 partitions instead of the 1 ? and if I keep the non-boot OS on the 1st partition of the 2nd drive (h), will the boot drive recognize the dual-boot 2nd xp drive if it's been reduced in size? BTW, the 2nd drive has only 3 partitions on it H,I,J and I would like to increase H from 1 partition to 3, by reducing it's size.​

-----Also, I've got 4 USB drives (2 100 GB and 2 250 GB), but I've never tried to restore an image from an external drive. Is this more problematical that restoring the image from an internal drive. ....& Also. What's the deal with the defragging tool in XP. I've defragged this partition (where ATI image is going) about half-a-dozen times, and rebooted twice to get this drive ready accept the image. It went from a lousy defrag on the 1st try, to a little better...better and better. But the last couple or 3 times it's left a ""tip at the end. Is this normal, sort of this defragger's mark to leave a little bit left undone? or is this just some quirk in XP's defragging SW... or something else? I've never noticed this happening before. Thx http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/8431/defraghl1.jpg

 

With all this resizing, you have a lot of work. I got a headache just trying to follow what you wanted to do.

Acronis Disk Director is a far better tool for that sort of work. You can change the size of the partitions without having to make images and restore them (although a full backup before making any changes is a good precaution.

If you want to do it the hard way, I wouldn't every use the clone feature. Just make images and then restore them. You can decrease the size of the partition when you restore it down to the used space in that partition. You can increase the size as long as there is unallocated space adjacent to or part of the partition that you are restoring.

 

As long as the drive letters don't change, it will be recognized. This information is stored in the BOOT.INI file on the C/boot partition.

Not normally, but you should boot from the recovery CD and confirm that you can see all your drives, internal and external, and that you can validate images on the external drive. If that's successful, there shouldn't be a problem restoring an image from the external drive.

Yes, the XP defragger sometimes just does odd things like that. It really doesn't matter. You won't lose anything when you make an image and restore it.

 

Re: Will ATI be able to resize a partion when I mount an image back to that partition

And to add to John's advice, you don't need to defrag a partition in order to prepare it to accept an image. TI will first delete the partition before restoring the image so all of your defragging will have been for naught.

 

Re: Will ATI be able to resize a partion when I mount an image back to that partition

Excellent clarification. I automatically assumed that the defragmentation was preparation for creating an image of that partition. That's worth doing to make the image smaller and created a bit faster.

However, defragging a partition before restoring an image to it is a lot like carefully polishing your car before you put it in the crusher.

 

Re: Will ATI be able to resize a partion when I mount an image back to that partition

I just figured that you should always defrag the partition before creating an image of that partition, as if you didn't, wouldn't you have to defrag that partition each time after mounting the image back to that partition? Maybe you don't? The drive where the image (about 20GB) is to be temporarily stored has only 28GB of free space, as it's also storing some of the large video files that were on the extra space in H (which are also BU on an external drive). When I restore the image to the "H" resized partition, I'll move them to the 70GB new partition created from H.

The Cloned HD is only for BU in case the 2nd OS image doesn't mount. (It's too bad that you just can't clone a partition with ATI).
I've had very few problems with ATI, however it's made some coaster images of BUs of my OS partition with different AV/FW combinations for instance, so I usually clone a HD as BU in case image failure. If/when the image works, I usually just format that BU'ed HD. If I could rely on ATI images to work 100% of the time, I wouldn't make a cloned BU. (thx for the info on Acronis Disk Director as I've been reading up on G-parted freeware to resize the partition)​

Thx, I thought you could and as I needed a BU "workable" image of the XP clean install partition anyway, it seemed logical to do both, create a BU image as well as resize the partition with ATI. Once you get a "workable" image on an internal drive, are there usually any problems with XPpro simply copying that image to an external drive for storage/BU?

 

Re: Will ATI be able to resize a partion when I mount an image back to that partition

Actually, when TI restores a partition it packs the files in very nicely, even if they were fragmented badly at the source. If you check right after a restoral you will find very little, if any, fragmentation.

Usually not; I do this all the time. Some people have reported problems doing this but in the end it always turns out to be hardware, cable, or memory problems with their PC. An image is simply a file, and XP should be capable of copying a file without introducing errors.

 

Re: Will ATI be able to resize a partion when I mount an image back to that partition

From my expierence with windows xp and true image. You can downsize a windows xp image partition backup, make it fit in a new smaller partition (as long as the backup use size fits in the smaller partition.) Example your 100gb(20gb) in use will fit in a 30gb partition with no problem. The only problem that I have encountered when downsizing partitions is drive letter change problems.

My advice is if you will be looking for partition software is to get paragon partition manager 9.0. That's the only software that has a built-in boot corrector. The boot corrector is a boot cd utility that can change drive letters/edit boot.ini/reslot partitions etc on a non-booting hard drive. As long as I have a boot corrector I can restore any true image xp partition onto any hard drive everytime (so far 100 percent success rate).

When your restoring dual boots into different partitions and resizing windows xp images you might run into drive letter problems. Having a boot corrector available will definitely make it easier for you to repair a simple drive letter/boot.ini problem.