Acronis Disk Director Resize & MBR Problem

[BobA]

I have a T41 that I want to set up for multiple XP OS boots. Each parition will have a test partition for a different Thinkpad (T40, T41, T42, etc). Then I will configure the boot.ini to reference whichever partition I need to boot under to test the respective system.

I started with a newly loaded T41 (with HPA) and tried to shrink the boot partition using Acronis Disk Director 10. After the 'shrink', the boot partition can't be found. Acronis just says do a repair to the MBR but that doesn't work. Then they told me to go through Microsoft's 'repair' sequence.

Any ideas out there? I"m trying to get a good technical explanation from Acronis so I may have more information later.

Bob

[mgo]

I have a T41 that I want to set up for multiple XP OS boots. Each parition will have a test partition for a different Thinkpad (T40, T41, T42, etc). Then I will configure the boot.ini to reference whichever partition I need to boot under to test the respective system.

I started with a newly loaded T41 (with HPA) and tried to shrink the boot partition using Acronis Disk Director 10. After the 'shrink', the boot partition can't be found. Acronis just says do a repair to the MBR but that doesn't work. Then they told me to go through Microsoft's 'repair' sequence.

Any ideas out there? I"m trying to get a good technical explanation from Acronis so I may have more information later.

Bob

I have used Disk Director for a number of years, but I do not think I am as advanced as you. I have found, however, that when trying ti install Windows Vista on a partition that was formatted in Disk Director using NTFS Vista will fail to install properly. I must then go back and re-format the partition right off of the actual Vista install disk for the installation to succeed.

Obviously, Vista goes looking for something in the boot sector that Disk Director does not lay down when formatted, even in NTFS. Mostly likely this is part of the MS anti-piracy scheme they have for Vista.

Otherwise, Disk Director has worked well with XP and Linux. Not sure if my experience is useful, but there it is.

[bill bolton]

You might want to try the Lenovo MBR repair utility in case the HPA is impacting things.....

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62978

Cheers,

Bill B.

[BobA]

I tried the Lenovo MBR repait utility. It said that it didn't recognize the MBR as a Lenovo MBR and that there was an error in the MBR. Then it said it was writing the MBR with fdisk mbr.

After all of that, same problem .. blinking cursor at boot up. I went back and cloned the partition using Acronis TrueImage - after I ran Lenovo's MBR repair utility. Still only got the blinking cursor.

I have had no success with either Acronis TrueImage or Disk Director - contrary to all the other notes on this forum. Very discouraging.

Does anyone reading this post know details about the MBR? I have an old utility that used to save and restore MBRs in a file. So someone could look at the Hex data and maybe try to understand what my problems are ..

Bob