grep life by Jeremy Glover

Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 FTW!

I upgraded my laptop hard drive from 160GB to 200GB. In the process I was left with a chunk of 40GB of unallocated space. For the past 4 months I’ve ignored this space because Windows Vista’s built-in partition manager couldn’t do anything with it due to Dell’s crazy partitioning scheme.

Partitions:

1. 16MB – Dell Diagnostics
2. 10GB – Recovery
3. 137GB – OS
4. 2GB – MediaDirect
5. 34GB – Unallocated

For some reason, hard drives are limited to 4 primary partitions and the drive already had 4 primary partitions (1-4 above). Vista’s partition manager doesn’t support moving partitions, only resizing them. It wouldn’t let me create a 5th primary partition either.

I did some research and found a live CD called GParted which should have worked in my case but ended up failing miserably after 32 hours! When I left for work at 8AM on Monday morning the estimated remaining time was 3 hours. When I got back from work it was up to 9:47:05. Ut oh. I waited half an hour and watched the progress go from 10.4GB to 10.9GB copied and the time dropped to 9:44:14. I ended up having to cancel the process on stage 2 of 9 because it may have never finished and the screen was certain to have burn-in from the static “progress” window. Now that my hard drive was useless in its current state I used Acronis True Image Home 11 to restore the backup I had made before I attempted to repartition using GParted. Pheww…it worked!

Today when I got home from work I decided to try a different program. Several forums suggested Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 which features Vista compatibility (unlike GParted). I downloaded the trial, played around with the partitions, and was prompted with a lovely demo warning telling me to put out or shut up. Since Acronis offers a 30-day money back guarantee I decided to shell out some cash ($50) and give it a shot.

I installed the software, entered the serial, created a bootable CD, popped it in my laptop, and fiddled with the partitions until I had them just the way I wanted.

Commit!

“REEERRRREEEERRRRRRREEEEEERRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR,” said my hard drive to my frightened ears. The hard drive was spinning so fast I was afraid it was going to shatter.

Operation 1 of 2: 40 seconds remaining.

30 seconds later…

Operation 2 of 2: 47 minutes remaining.

4 minutes later…

Vista was booting and everything was peachy! Windows updated a hard drive driver (no idea why) and told me I had to reboot. I rebooted and now have a 170GB+ OS partition!

Spectacular!

GParted – 0
Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 – 1

Thank you, Acronis!

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