Cannot specify size for boot partition
I am attempting to transfer my Windows XP system to a Western Digital hard drive using the Acronis software supplied by Western Digital.
I select the option of manually specifying the sizes of the partitions on the new drive but the software does not allow this for the transferred boot partition only for the two data logical drives. No matter what order I do things it insists that the maximum and minimum sizes for the transferred boot partition are the size of the source partition. Getting extremely frustrated.
colin.
thankyou for your suggestion.
The WD version allows cloning, but obviously does not allow changing the size of the boot partition. The other option is to let the software decide to allocate the space on the destination HDD proportionally but it also dedicates all the extra space to the data logical drives leaving the boot partition sized exactly as on the source hard drive.
I suspect that you are correct and that the WD version is deliberately limited. I may approach WD for answers as well.
What I want to do is transfer my system to the new HDD controlling the sizes of the boot system partition and the two data logical drives myself as I want to dedicate most of the extra space to the boot drive.
I may try downloading the trial version of Acronis as you suggest.
Carlyle:
One other cause of this behavior is file system errors or bad blocks on the source disk. You should run chkdsk x: /r on the partition that will not resize. Substitute the appropriate drive letter for x:, rebooting the PC if necessary.
Colin (Bodgy) , Mark,Thanks for your replies.
Problem solved. It turns out that the Acronis Software supplied by Western Digital is cut down in the sense that it cannot expand the system boot partition during cloning. I would have thought that it would be cut down in that it would only work when a WD disk is involved but obviously that is not considered sufficient.
I finally used this Acronis Software, manually specifying the increased size for the data partitions and specifying all unused space left as a result after the new system partition and before the two data logical drives. Then I used GPARTED downloaded and burned to CD to expand the system partition. Initially it did not work because there were errors in the new system partition that prevented GPARTED from from performing the requested action. GPARTED recommended running chkdsk /f on the partition first. I did this and it uncovered some errors including invalid attribute specifications and multiply linked allocation blocks and orphan files. After this GPARTED worked fine.
Later on I ran chkdsk /f on the system boot partition of my old drive and it showed similar errors, so Mark your suggestion about running chkdsk /x before doing things is a good idea.
Before finallly using GPARTED sucessfully I also tried several other free partition managers downloaded from the internet which either which did not work or did not have partition change size functions. I tried Parttion Logic but it was unable to recognize the installed HDDs and Swiss Knife seemed to be able to create and delete but not to resize partitions.
Regards Carl.
Carl:
The Western Digital edition of Acronis True Image should have been able to expand the size of the system partition - that's not a limitation of the software. The reason that it did not allow expansion was because it detected errors in the file system. All versions of True Image will not allow resizing of a partition with file system errors. That's a safety mechanism to prevent data loss.
Glad that you got it sorted and working.
Mark.
The thing that Acronis True Image did not as far as I know say why it refused to allow size change, it simply showed minimum and maximum sizes as being the same and regressed set any other value I tried to type into the new size text box.
I suggest that an explicit error message that pasrtition cannot be resized due to the presence of errors would be a good idea.
Thanks again for your assistance.
Regards, Carl.