When will Windows 7 be supported?
Is there any word on when Windows 7 (64 bit) will be supported? I goofed up on my install and installed to the wrong partition, and 7 registered itself automatically...so I feel like I'm stuck until I can get this resolved. I bought Disk Director today specifically to fix this issue; DD looks like it's working while running it in Windows 7, and I get prompted to reboot to allow the changes to be made. Acronis DD seems to do its thing during bootup, but when I get back into Win7, my partition hasn't been changed at all.
Thanks
Pete
I can't install DD suite on Win 7 32. When will it be supported or is there a work-around (one a novice can use...)?
Thank you.
John F.
John,
The next release of DD is currently being tested (see this post). Acronis doesn't release dates.
If you have build 2,160 (or can download it), it should install in Windows 7. The last build (2,239) was (in part) released to block installing on Windows 7.
Keep in mind that if you're running any of the later builds of TI 2009/2010 that DD build 2,160 isn't compatible with them.
Be VERY, VERY CAREFUL!
There is a reason why Acronis have blocked the latest DD from working on Windows 7. And it's NOT just so they can sell more copies of v.11 when it comes out.
I used DD build 2160 to create a partition formatted to NTFS, then installed Windows 7 RC on the partition. All seemed well. I then tried installing Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 . Visual Studio installations are always a good "stress test" of file systems; in particular they install very many small sample files.
Part way through the installation, it failed - unclear error message. This often happens if there is the slightest error with the installation medium, so I copied the Visual Studio to HD first; tried again; still failed with errors.
After abandoning the attempt to install it, I found that my Windows 7 installation had "gone sour". It kept coming up with disk filing system errors. Chkdsk either wouldn't run right through to fix them; or if it did seem to complete, the errors started reappearing. Basically, after a short while the installation was grossly unstable & unusable.
In the end, all I could do was to blitz the Windows 7 partition & reinstall from scratch.
At the time, I hadn't made the connection with having created the partition with DD. However subsequently, I did some net-trawling, & found that it is well documented (although not very openly or freely), that if you create a partition formatted as NTFS with DD, and use that partition with Windows 7, then after a while the filing system slowly corrupts and soon becomes completely unusable.
It seems that there is some "difference of opinion" between Acronis & Microsoft regarding the NTFS specification; the assumption must be that Microsoft have altered their implementation with Windows 7 in some way. Presumably they consider that this change is compatible with their published specification for NTFS, but Acronis have a different interpretation.
It's a subtle problem. That's the danger. So you COULD use an older DD build with Windows 7; but if you use it to create a partition formatted as NTFS, then it may blow up in your face weeks later. In fact even with the latest DD there's still a big danger, as you can of course use the latest DD from within Vista, or XP, to create a new partition; and then install Windows 7 on that partition. By my experience, that scenario is also playing with fire.
HTH.
The problem of using an NTFS partition formatted by DD as the destination for a Windows installation isn't specific to Windows 7. It is a problem with how DD does the formatting, but it affects XP, Vista and Windows 7. The general recommendation is that it's okay to create the partition with DD, but let the Windows installer reformat it as part of the installation process. Doing this seems to avoid the problem.
Thank you all for the detailed info. I'll wait until a completely compatible DD is released. Don't have the stomach for dealing with the potential headaches.
John F.