Acronis disk director screwed up HD - any tips?

[Michael Tibes]

So I wanted to create some space for win7 on my laptop... I did use Acronis disk director to shrink one data partition, it finishes, I close disk director and reboot - and the drive is unreadable afterwards. It does try to boot, reads the boot manager and starts into either vista or xp, but both ways it ends in a bluescreen.

If I start acronis disk director from cd, it says the drive wasn't initialized ?? :icon_twisted: :icon_twisted:

Apart from the obvious question what other software to use for partitioning - that's the second time disk director seriously screws up - does anyone have a tip on what to do? I'd like to save as much data as possible, I didn't expect some crap like that to happen, so I didn't back up the whole drive before...

I could reinstall the boot sector from an older backup if that helps, or is it gonna make things even worse?

Michael

[ROCKINROG]

That seems kinda odd. Usually when you resize your partition and it's an OS partition Acronis has to reboot to gain full access to the Windows partition and repartition it. When it's done it reboots. I've never had an issue like that ever. Maybe I didn't quite get what is happening?

[Michael Tibes]

It wasn't the OS partition, that's why I didn't do a backup, it was an unimportant data partition. What I understand so far, is that there must be some kindof data (FAT?) corruption, I tried to create 80 GB free space from a 250 GB partition and now I get 1,9TB free space reported in that 80 GB area - on a 500 GB HD. But this error craps out all the other partitions on that drive as well, including the OS partitions :-(

So when I try to acces the drive with trueimage or diskdirector I get an error that it can't access some sectors. Probably because something says the drive was larger than it physically is...

Michael

[Animus]

I tried the Acronis ghosting stuff about 6 years ago but didn't get far before it totally destroyed my boot drive. Haven't touched the crap since.


But anytime you do any partition editing I would suggest some serious backing up before hand because you can do some serious damage real easily. I have had good success with Partition Magic resizing things.

Sorry to hear about your troubles. Maybe try some of the disk repair utilities on Hiren's Boot cd or UBCD.

[ROCKINROG]

Did you try and go back and use recover partition? That might get it back.

[Michael Tibes]

I did try to boot from the disk directors rescue media cd and ran the 'recover lost partition' function, but it led to nothing (but took ages). I assume the FAT (or however this is called with NTFS) is screwed and looks logically correct apart from allocating way more space than the drive actually has.

I guess I'd need a different software to fix it - maybe even checkdisk might do. I just wanted to be sure not to lose something important, so I'm back up and running with a new drive and from a backup which is some months old. This way I can sort out the screwed drive when I find the time or just format it if I'm not missing anything important. I did manage to write a new backup from it with Acronis truimage after skipping two errors, so I guess I'll be able to recover whatever files might be needed. Recovering the whole partition doesn't work because it wants to be written some billion TB after the drive start - cheers...

Just a silly waste of time - which happens so easily when I'm in a hurry and try to get more done than really is possible. Otherwise I'd have made backups of course. I believed the worst to happen would be to lose the partition I was changing, not the whole drive...

Michael

[ROCKINROG]

Ah well, sorry for your luck bro. I always do incremental backups. It's just strange that it did that. I've never had an issue like that when resizing. The only thing I've found is that the newer versions of Acronis True Image boot cd tend to be a little slower and it tends to stall before it starts to do what you just clicked on.

[paulwr]

Never a problem using Acronis in 5 years and I use it all the time. BUT, I'm using the version I got from VisionDAW five years ago.

-Paul

[Michael Tibes]

Never a problem using Acronis in 5 years and I use it all the time. BUT, I'm using the version I got from VisionDAW five years ago.

-Paul
In case you haven't read it yet and you want to go Win7: http://www.cubendo.com/showthread.php?2113-Win7-weird-error-and-solution-(partitioning-tips-for-a-solid-Win7-install)
I've never had problems with Acronis up until the above issue and now that one. Oh yeah, one more: I recovered the Vista and XP OSs from a backup onto a new HD and then uninstalled the old version of Disk Direktor in order to install the latest one which is Win7 compatible - and it automatically chose which OS I would want to choose after the uninstall. Not a wise choice it made, because none would boot any more after that. Installing Win 7 did fix this and got Vista back at least.

It's a bit like being back in windows 95 times, trial and error and if it works then I still don't know why. At least I got Win7 installed and I was again amazed how easy and smooth an OS installation can be. Finally a MS product that does not only work but actually feels good. :-)

Michael

[paulwr]

In case you haven't read it yet and you want to go Win7: http://www.cubendo.com/showthread.php?2113-Win7-weird-error-and-solution-(partitioning-tips-for-a-solid-Win7-install)
I've never had problems with Acronis up until the above issue and now that one.

I'm already with W7 x64. Working great for me. There is a guy at the Nashville ClubCubase meetings that has a very complex 7 computer farm with 16 channel surround sound that had tons of issues and he went back to XP. Driver issues with hardware he's got. I had no serious problems. I gave up my Waves plugs to go 64bit because all else worked fine, and don't miss them much at all.

-Paul