Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 FTW!
July 15, 2008 – 10:55 pmI 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:
- 16MB - Dell Diagnostics
- 10GB - Recovery
- 137GB - OS
- 2GB - MediaDirect
- 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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