Disk Director 10 ERROR on reboot
Hi all,
I have Acronis Disk Director 10 installed on my PC, and am trying to use it to resize a logical partition (not the system partition). This requires a reboot. Unfortunately, I left an external USB hard drive attached to the PC, which is (so I now learn) a problem. On rebooting into the Acronis Windows Native Mode, it stalls at "analysing partitions" with the error: "unable to read disk 3 - Retry, Ignore, ignore all". Drive 3 is the USB hard drive. I would select "ignore", but can't - my keyboard and mouse are both USB/bluetooth, and apparently aren't recognised in this environment. Nothing I type at the keyboard has any effect, and I cannot select any of the options.
My only apparent option at this point is a hard reboot (power off). I am unwilling to do this except as a last resort. I am concerned that if I do, I may lose all access to the partition in question.
So my questions are:
1) Does anyone know whether it is "safe" to reboot when DD10 is in Windows Native Mode, and at the "Analyzing Partitions" step?
2) Will DD10 already have re-written the partition table in the MBR? I assume that if it has, and I hard reboot, then I will have a corrupted partition table and will loose access to the partition.
3) Anybody got any ideas how to get out of this?
Thanks for your help
Hi MudCrab,
Thanks for taking the time to responding. I don't have an entire disc image, I do have images of the system and data partitions. I'm not sure if these would help in the worst case scenario - hard reboot and loss of the resized partition (which wasn't imaged - didn't hold important data). The system partition image did include the MBR, so presumably the partition table with the old arrangement of partitions. But if DD10 has made any changes so far, then the physical partitions would not match the partition table, so problems. I note your good advice of whole disc images for future experiments.
Neither do I have standard keyboard or mouse available.
Unless someone has a better idea, my working plan is to power down, unplug the usb drive then restart - if DD10 then restarts, hopefully it will proceed normally. Am i right in thinking that the DD10 environment is actually a Linux variant?
As long as you have backups of the partitions on the drive being changed, you should be okay. The main thing is to have your system and any important data backed up.
If the only problem was from the USB drive, then I would think DD would proceed on reboot (assuming it retries).
When DD reboots from Windows, it hooks into the pre-Windows bootup (same place chkdsk uses). DD is running in Windows. If DD is showing white text on a light-blue background or white text on a black background, it's in this mode. If the DD GUI is showing, it's in Lunix mode.
If you boot DD from the DD CD, DD will be running in Linux (the Full Mode version) or DOS (the Safe Mode version).
It was in pre-windows boot up, then - white text on pale blue background. I went ahead and unplugged the USB hard drive, then did a hard reboot. Seems to be OK - windows started to boot, then I got a brief flash screen to say that DD10 had finished, followed by a full boot into windows. The partition changes failed - no surprise there - everything is as it was before. The partitions all seem to be both mounted and accessible, which is a big relief.
Thanks for your advice and help - much appreciated. For my second attempt, I'll do a whole disk backup first, then run the partition changes from the DD10 CD. Before I do that, is it necessary (or worth) running CHDSK on the failed partiton?
You can run chkdsk if you want, but I doubt any errors were caused the failed DD attempt. I don't think DD made any changes at all.
You were right - it didn't make any changes, and there were no disc errors. Have now successfully repeated the process, first unplugging all USB devices, and achieved the result I wanted.
Thanks for your help and advice
You're welcome. I'm glad it worked out successfully for you. Thanks for posting back.