Oleksiy,

Let me state up front that I am not an expert on partitioning, resizing, merging, etc.  However, the first step you should take is to backup your current drive, before trying any merging/resizing.  Obviously, the trial version of ATI 2016 is fully capable of doing this backup.  You can be performing this backup while waiting for additional responses.

I am confident one of the other MVPs will provide assistance with the "re-partitioning."

Regards,

FtrPilot

Have to agree with FtrPilot,  Take a full disk image before you do anything - that will be your saving grace if things go wrong.

Unfortunately, the trial version of ATIH only does backups, but does not allow for recoveries so a full license will be needed.  

***EDIT**** I was incorrect above - you can restore with the trial, but only using the offline bootable media (thanks to FTRPilot for pointing that out to me)

2768: Trial Version Limitations of Acronis Products

*** /EDIT****

Once you have a good back and know that recovery is possible, you will have to use a third party tool.  In this case, I would reocmmend PartiionWizardMini.  The free version can do a lot and I use it for many things on my personal systems and other clients.  Unforutantely though, converting from dynamic to basic disks requires a license for that feature.  I have not found any free tools that can go from dynamic to basic (without formatting the drive first, which would defeat the purpose of what you want to do).  If it's worth it to get back to basic disks though, this will be money well spent. 

http://www.partitionwizard.com/convertpartition/convert-dynamic.html

Thank you for all the advice.

Well, everything is not that easy as we wanted it to be.

1. Somehow for any unknown reason I have not been successful in making entire PC packup using ATIH 2016. I selected all logical disks (C & D & volume reserved by the system(100MB) except external USB HDD(NTFS) that I have left as Destination HDD for backup copy. I chose to create entire copy(not incremental one) and to verify that backup has been properly created and is ready to use. Also I did not use sector2sector/cluster2cluster copying. After 1 hour of creating backup copy progress to destination external HDD - the process fails to complete with pop-op window something like "The backup copying can not be completed ". Are there any logs so I can take a look at them and figure out what was the root cause of this? It creates *.tib file on external USB HDD but I'm not sure whether has it ended up properly.

N.B.: I have tried three times from bootable media (usb flash-drive). And each time the process of creating backup copy has failed to complete on a stage of validating/verification of backup archive (see attached screenshot). In Windows file-archive is also shown as corrupt (see attached screenshot). But in ATIH 2016 Application this archive successdylly passed validation check and has been added to an App for recovery process. I'm confused.

2. As for MiniTool Partition Wizard. I have studied it and found that the tool can only convert simple volumes to basic ones if simple volume has only one partition (please see bottom of comments at http://www.partitionwizard.com/help/convert-dynamic-disk-to-basic-disk… ). In my case D: volume has four partition. They suggest to copy that volume directly to another Basic disk. I'm getting confused.

3. As for justification of converting dynamic simple disks to basics ones. It has turned out that Windows Partition manager works not properly. Instead of moving part of partition to another partition while changing partition - he is simple mount it up there. Later it causes HDD heads to run all over the disk and peformance degradation. The system slowed down in booting and shutting down.

The logs are in the folder:

C:\ProgramData\Acronis\TrueImageHome\Logs

The folder may be hidden.  The file should be something like:

service_2016-03-12-10-00-01.log

It is a text file, so you should be able to read it using Notepad.

When making the backup, use Disks & Partitions, not entire PC.

Also, select full partition list.  Picture 1 below shows short partition list.  Picture 2 shows full partition list.  Tick the box in the upper left, which should tick the boxes below.  Shown on picture 2.  Let us know if you can get that to run successfully.

Once you read the log file, let us know that says.

FtrPilot

Oleksiy,

In answer to your question 1:

Perform a Disk and Partition backup selecting the 100MB System partition and the 244.32GB (boot, pagrfile, crash dump) partition.  Configure this backup as Full backup of those 2 partitions assuming you are using the boot Recovery media.

Save this backup file to your external disk.  This will become your safety net backup which hopefully you will not need to use. Please run a validation on this backup file either during the backup process or after the backup file has been created.

DO NOT select Volume D: in this backup.

If you are using the Windows installed TI 2016 application to perform this backup select the Options button at the bottom left of the Backup GUI screen and configure as Custom, Full, Do not schedule.  Now select the Exclusions tab and remove all listed exclusions except for pagefile, hiberfil, and swapfile.  To remove the other items in the list click on each one to select(highlight) then click the Minus button at the bottom of the list.

In answer to your question 2:

What PartitionWizard is telling you is that to avoid data loss on the disk you should copy the contents of the Volume D: disk/partition to another location.  Your first screenshot shows total data amount on D: as 140.81GB (687.10GB available, 546.29 Free).  Copy all data on D: to your external disk (hopefully you have the room for it) but before you do create a folder on the external disk for the data, a folder name of Data seems appropriate. 

After copy is complete you can now use Windows Disk Management to select Volume D: and format the volume which will remove the 4 partitions now showing in your Disk Management screen and leave the entire space as unallocated.  This can also be done using PartitionWizard.

Now using the paid for version of PartitionWizard you can convert the entire disk from a Simple Dynamic Volume to a Simple Basic Volume.  This should leave the unallocated space on the disk but if not you can create the unallocated space again after the conversion from Dynamic to Basic is performed.

You should now be able to boot your PC which PartitionWizard will do for you after it performs the conversion and you will now have a Simple Basic disk once again.

You can now select the unallocated space on the disk using PartitionWizard or Windows Disk Management and assign drive letter D: to it and then recopy your data from the Data folder you created on your external disk to it.

If for some reason this fails then you would need to restore the backup you created in the first step here to recover the Windows installation to the disk.  Below is a link to Web Help page which discusses recovery of Dynamic disk volumes using TI 2016.  If you have to do this post back for more assistance if needed.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATI2016/index.html#2…

Thank you guys for all the advice, help and assistance you guided me through. Finally I've made it back, from dynamic to basic disk. I used AOMEI Backupper in case of immergency. Also I've reinstalled ATIH and successfully created backup from bootable media(CD) so don't know what previous log contained.  Also when I boot from bootable media - there is no choice between short and full partition list, there is just a list and that's it. On the other hand - I found strange to back up disk while working on it.

At the end,  somehow when I click on that backup file in Windows explorer - I get the same error. Is it OK? Actually settings were the same as before and strictly to your recommedations. May be converting dynamic disk to basic helped? Don't know.

If it's telling you it's corrupt, better to be cautious and assume it is.  You can try to validate it with the bootable media first to see if validation succeeds or not.  If it does validate, the next way to verify it would be to restore the image to ANOTHER hard drive, and swap out that drive for the main one, see if it boots and if it does boot, you should be good to go.  The only real way to validate is to test the backup, so don't overwrite the main drive... just in case it really is a bad backup.

So which tool did you use to convert back from Dynamic disk - a previous recovery, AOMEI, minitool parition wizard or something else?

Yes... ATIH booted from bootable usb-flash-drive and ATIH on Windows validated backup(both, twice). So the backup supposed to be valid. The ony windows explorer itself stating "it's corrupt". It's a pity I can not rely on this info. Because I don't have another(already 3rd HDD) just to verify this. Also, please bear in mind that 1st, the main HDD(the one that is source HDD used to be backed up to external 2nd USB 500GB HDD) is internal laptop HDD. So I find it very complicated cloning 1st HDD to 3rd HDD and then swapping them only to validate the backup.

I created entire disk backup(all partitions) with AOMEI Backupper Standard. Then deleted whole D: and this space became unallocated .Then I borrowed MiniTool Partition Wizard Enterprise from friend of mine and converted dynamic C: to basic without formatting it, just rebooted. After reboot I got C: as basic primary disk and created D: volume from unallocated space as basic primary disk as well. 

P.S.: I borrowed 3rd HDD from friend of mine and restored image to this drive and swaped with main drive. I got lucky - buckup copy is valid. But I have to say - it a kind of tricky, difficult, and most of times - not available way to validate the backup copy.

N.B.: By the way, is there any real difference between making backup copy in ATIH in Windows or while booting from bootable media? Can't google up.

Glad you found a way to confirm that your backup was not corrupt.

There are some differences in backup between using the boot media and using Windows installed app.  The default exclusions that the Windows by default excludes from a backup are included in a backup when using the boot media except for .tmp and .temp files.

Just one more quick question please.

What is the best way to copy my HHD to SSD using ATIH? At the moment on HDD I have 1 partition reserved by Win7(100MB), 1 disk C: with 250GB (OS and Apps, 150GB is free) and 1 disk D: with 750GB(650GB free).

Clone? Backup and recover? Other way to do this?

How to make on SSD copy of first two partitions (reserved one and C:) and cut the D: to 200-250GB in order to make it happen entire HDD to SSD.

SSD used - Samsung 850 PRO Series on it way.

Thanks in advance.

Take a full disk/parition image of the hard drive.  As long as the total size of the backed up data will fit on the SDD.  Don't select "sector by sector" though.  Your image will only capture the used data on the drive and push it back on the SSD in the same partition scheme.  Alternatively, do the saem thing, but exclude your D: Drive partition.  Then you can just have your existing C: drive on the new SSD and keep D on the second drive.  You can use other apps (I like partition wizard mini free) to blow away the other paritions on your D: drive and extend it out so you have full access to the drive again, without losing any data on it.  Of course though, I'd recommend taking an image of D first (just in case).

ATIH disappointed me again. I cloned HDD in manual mode(changed partitions) to SSD. But it crashed or not cloned MBR. So when rebooted, I've received of course message "Bootmgr is missing, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot" . Also please take into in account that I have chosen all partitions to be cloned, so I couldn't figure out where MBR has gone. The drive C: was made active, but not with boot-status. I have used Windows installation DVD to recover MBR in GUI and CMD mode. It has said that issue has been resolved but error has not gone. This was sad. Then I turned to Samsung data migration tool and it has worked well.

Hello, Oleksiy.

You said that you used the "Manual" method when performing cloning. What changes did you make to the partition layout?

You also said that the C: volume was made active. Did you set the active flag on the C: volume when configuring the cloning options? If so, that was the cause of the error - the System partition (100 MB partition) needs to be active, not the C: (Boot) partition.

I just wanted to resize partitions during clone precess. "Manual mode" - meant that I manually set partiton sizes and aligned them. Because I was clonning 1TB HDD(with 100MB|250GB|750GB) to 512GB SSD and automatic mode is about to proportionally resize partitions to smaller sizes. In manual mode I ended up with 100MB|250GB|250GB partitions, in AUTO mode I used to get  something like 700MB|100GB|350GB.

As for which partition to make an active... Frankly speaking it's been a while ago, and I'm not sure I remember which partition I've made active. I used to play around with it and tried to do this with AOMEI Backuper as well, but with no luck too.  May be you're right and this was the root cause Dmitriy. Thank you for your feedback, I'll keep it for the future porpose.