Unable to shrink partition size - windows

I am trying to install Linux in a computer that has Windows 7. The first step was shrinking the disk size but Windows did not allow any reduction. Thus I followed a number of steps to disable "unmovable" files
I disabled the Page File
I disabled hibernation
I disabled System Protection
After that nothing seemed to have changed so I checked the disk fragmentation and it was 11% fragmented. I have since then run at least 4 defrags and I have also defragged the free space using Defraggler.
As of now the disk looks like this
Right now, Windows refuses to shrink the partition by any amount (I imagine that the files at the end of the disk are the troublesome ones).
Coming from an Linux background I am unsure what else needs to be done in order to shrink the partition.

Are you using Windows disk management tool to do the shrink? Here's a link for that method.
https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

Also make sure the recycle bin on that drive is empty.

I finally figured it out.
The easiest way is just to use a Live USB with GParted on it since that will allow you to move Windows protected files around (the windows OS is not loaded on the live distro).
If just defragmenting is concerned one can use Hiren's Boot CD and the included Defraggler for the same purpose.

I had the same problem on Windows 10. Turns out it was antivirus software that was running on the machine that prevented defragmentation happen properly. I actually had to temporarily uninstall antivirus. After that, the Disk Management tool was able to correctly shrink the volume.

Related

Impossible to update catalina OS

I tried to update my mojave to catalina in order to update Xcode... But impossible I have 27Gb Free space but all time this error:
an error occurred while installing the selected updates
And after each error I have 8Gb in less, so if I continue I while arrive to not have free space, I don't know how to delete this fail load on my system storage.
I found that 8Gb are add in private/var/folders (never touch this folders) just reboot in safe mode, this will erase temporary file...
As found here:
A clean install uses up around 20 GB of storage space. In addition,
you need to allow for space for your user data, applications, and
future updates. As if that weren’t enough, you should keep at least 10
to15 percent of the startup drive free to ensure adequate performance.
I normally suggest a good deal more free space than that, but here
we’re just talking about a minimum to ensure you can install and use
macOS Catalina.
So the solution may be freeing up to 30 GB of space, just to be sure.
You can try this utility to better identify some files to delete.

Using GParted to Extend Size of Mac OSX Hard Disk

My computer runs Windows 8. I have a VM Virtual Box Instance of Mac OSX. I made the hard disk 20GB at first, but now I need it to be bigger. I made a back up of the hard disk and then proceeded to resize the original hard disk to 30GB. Now I am trying to actually be able to use the extra 10GB I have added.
First I tried to do this through Disk Utility on the actual VM to no avail. When I tried to resize the partition to use the entire available space, and then clicked "apply" it simply did nothing. When I tried to resize the partition to use any less than the entire available space, it gave me the error MediaKit reports partition (map) too small.
Now I have loaded a GParted ISO onto the VM, and have been trying to use that to resize the hard disk but this is also to no avail. Here is an image of the situation with GParted:
When I try to resize "Yosemite Erase" (the hard disk) it says that the minimum and maximum space that it can take up are the same, 19.20GB, which is what it currently is. I tried moving the "Recovery HD" over to the other side of the unallocated space. But I still was unable to resize "Yosemite Erase" for the same reason; it just doesn't let me.
The warning "YosemiteErase" has says Unable to read the contents of this file system! Because of this some operations may be unavailable. The cause might be a missing software package. The following list of software packages is required for hfs+ file support: hfsprogs.
Does anyone know what I should do?
EDIT:
Nevermind. It turns out that GParted does a "fix" of the hard disk before the GUI boots which I originally had disregarded. However it turns out that when I try to extend the size of the hard disk in Disk Utility, it now works perfectly because of this fix.
I ran into this issue trying to install Kali Linux on a Mac.
I installed "hfsprogs" as the error suggested:
sudo apt-get install hfsprogs
...but the error in Gparted never went away and it never showed the "used" amount on the hfs+ share, despite Gparted showing that the plugin was now installed.
Gparted also tried to "fix" it for me as well, that seemed to have no effect.
I ended up booting into OSX and using Disk Utility to resize the HFS+ partition.
I suspect that the hfsprogs package allows some info about HFS+ partitions in Gparted, but doesn't enable resizing partitions.

How do backup apps which create a system image handle disk changes during the image creation process?

I created a backup disk image of my disk yesterday and the software told me to close all Windows programs to make sure the process finishes successfully.
I did that, but I was wondering what happens when some program does write to the disk nevertheless during the process. Windows 7 is a complex system and surely various log files and such are written continuously (the disk has one partition which contains the Windows install too). How does the backup software handle it when the disk content is changed during image creation?
What is the algorithm in this case?
Snapshotting, or 'Shadow Copy' as Microsoft calls it, see Shadow Copy on wikipedia

How do I improve Windows Subversion client update performance?

How do I improve Subversion client update performance? It appears to be disk bound on the client.
Details:
CollabNet Windows client version 1.6.2 (r37639)
Windows XP SP2
3 GB RAM with PF Usage around 1 GB and System Cache of 1.1 GB.
Disk has write caching enabled
Update takes 7-15 minutes (when very little to update).
Checkout has 36,083 directories/files (from svn list)
Repository has 58,750 revisions.
Checkout takes about 2.7 GB
Perf monitor shows % Disk Write time stays near 90% during update.
Max Disk Read Bytes/sec got up to 12.8M and write got up to 5.2M
CPU, paging file usage, and network usage are all low.
Watching the server performance seems to show that it isn't a bottleneck.
I'm especially interested in answers besides getting a faster disk (especially configuration changes).
Updates from some of the suggestions:
I need the whole thing so sparse directories won't work.
Another client (TortoiseSVN) takes 7 minutes also
TortoiseSVN icon overlays have be configured so they don't cause the problem.
Anti-virus is configured to to skip that directory is it isn't causing the problem.
I experience exatly the same thing. Recently replaced Perforce with svn, but if we cannot overcome the performance problems on Windows me must consider another tool.
Using svn 1.6.6, Win XP and Vista clients. RedHat server.
My observations matches yours:
Huge disk-write activity.
Antivirus not a bottleneck.
No matter witch svn-clients are used.
No server or network bottleneck.
Complementary info
More than 3 times faster operations on:
Linux (Ubuntu).
Linux (Ubuntu) running on VirtualBox at Win Vista host.
Win XP running on VMWare at RedHat host.
Do you need every bit of the repository on your working copy? If you truly only care about particular portions of the tree, look into Subversion's Sparse Directories (a.k.a. "Sparse Checkouts") feature. It allows you to manipulate your working copy so it only contains those directories of interest.
Just as an example, you might use this to prune documentation, installer-related files, etc. Depending on what you truly need on your local machine, embracing this approach could make a serious dent in your wait times.
Try svn client version 1.5.. It helped me on my Vista laptop. Versions 1.6. are extremely slow.
This is more likely to be your network and the amount of data moved as well as your client. Are you using Tortoise? I find it to be a bit slow myself when moving that much data!
Are you using TortoiseSVN? If so, the Icon Overlays do slow down operations. If you go to TortoiseSVN Settings/Icon Overlays there are several settings you can tweak to control the level to which you want to use the Overlays, including turning them off completely. See if that affects your performance.
Do you run a virus checker that uses on-access scanning? That can really make it crawl. If so, turn it off and see if that helps. Most scanners will have a way to exclude specific directories if that helps.
Nobody seems to be pointing out the one reason that I often consider a design flaw. Subversion creates a second "pristine" copy of the checkout for offline operations. If you're checking out 4G of files, it's actually writing 8G to disk.
Compare a checkout to an export. That will show you the massive difference when writing those second copies.
There's nothing you can do about that.
Upgrade to svn 1.7
From Discussion of Slow Performance of SVN Update:
The update process in svn 1.6 goes something like this:
search the entire working copy, to see what's there at the moment, and locking it so no one changes the answer during the next steps
tell that to the server
receive from the server whatever new stuff you need, applying the changes to the files as you go
recurse over the entire working copy again, unlocking it
If there are many directories and files, steps 1 and 4 can take up a
lot of time. This would be consistent with your observation of long
delays with no network traffic.
Working copy format was changed in svn 1.7. Now all meta information is stored in SQLite database in root folder of working copy and there is no need to perform steps 1 and 4 any more which consumed most of the time durring svn update.

Windows Vista Virtual PC-image for Visual Studio-development minimized

Which features and services in Vista can you remove with nLite (or tool of choice) to make a Virtual PC-image of Vista as small as possible?
The VPC must work with development in Visual Studio.
A normal install of Vista today is like 12-14 GB, which is silly when I got it to work with Visual Studio at 4 GB. But with Visual Studio it totals around 8 GB which is a bit heavy to move around in multiple copies.
You can try and cut stuff out with vLite, but unless you cut out a real lot it's not going to save a ton of drive space. Here's your best bets:
Disable Hibernate and run disk cleanup to remove any hibernation file.
Disable System restore entirely and use disk cleanup to remove all restore points... this will save an enormous amount of space.
Disable SuperFetch (since it kills your VM hard drive with it's crazy usage)
Minimize the size of your pagefile by setting a smaller static size and make sure to assign lots of memory to your VM to compensate.
Use the disk utilities to shrink your VM drive down as far as possible.
Once you have the base machine configured, I would suggest using VMware workstation and the awesome Linked Clones feature, which will let you create a completely new VM based on the base machine, but only using a portion of the space.
I would not advise running a Vista VM from a USB flash drive, it will be slower than dirt.

Resources