Shrink OS Volume

CBM said:

During the resizing operation, before I clicked Apply and started the resizing I was never offered the opportunity to retain or change the partition letter. I was not offered the opportunity to assign a letter after the operation was completed. I've spent the past three hours trying to find an answer to the problem, to no avail.

You cannot change the drive letter on the OS partition or it will ruin Win7. I don´t know why you would want to try.

Please post back another screenshot of your full Disk Mgmt drive map with listings. If PW CD disagrees with this in any way, post a camera snap or type out its differing listings.

I am traveling and distracted but growing baffled at why a simple partition shrink which we´ve done here thousands of times has become such a complicated mess. PW CD does this flawlessly without a single documented case of CD failure, irrespective of scares which have been thrown up about occasional failure of its installed version.

mjf said:

I'm not a Novice to Partition Wizard and have used it often.
However, I used for the first time the other day on my OS (Boot,...) partition to shrink it to a size able to accommodate an SSD. Sorry to say it moved files and screwed up! The MFT wasn't the issue.
I recovered from an image and completed the job. But take WHS's advice early in the thread and basically be prepared to recover from a PW foul up.

Also, if you ever invoke your factory recovery you'll be back to the old partition structure.

Did you use the PW CD? While we´ve had failures using PW installed version which must commit to RAM at reboot to complete tasks, I recall no failure reported in thousands of cases where PW CD has been used here to do both simple and complicated partitioning operations.

Please document thoroughly with screenshots any PW boot disk failures, as non-specific comments disparaging the most important tool we use here are not helpful and confuse the OP.

OK now; here we go. My sixty-one year old brain has apparently dwindled to the size of a walnut because I can't figure out how to use the multi-quote, and this is after reading several articles about it on the Internet. I will henceforth, to my chagrin, engage in copy and paste.

"You have not mentioned whether MyDefrag did the job of bringing the files together or not?"

rraod, I spent time on the MyDefrag forum and I also read the user manual before running MyDefrag. I ran it with the script "System Disk Monthly". The available shrink space before running MyDefrag was 256,491MB and after running it the available shrink space was 1432MB. I then ran my PerfectDisk 11 Professional to see where on the drive the files were located. I have attached three screenshots showing the results.

"You cannot change the drive letter on the OS partition or it will ruin Windows 7. I don´t know why you would want to try."

gregrocker, I had no intention of changing the letter of my OS partition. I simply wanted to retain it. I was disappointed that PW did not point out, anywhere in the help menu, on the application interface or on its website, that the partition letter would not change and that the inability to change it was in fact a protective measure for the benefit of the user. I spent a lot of time researching the issue on the Internet because I was worried that the letter would change or would be absent after the resizing operation. I used the PW bootable CD that I had burned from the ISO.

I am amazed at the ease of use and simplicity of the user interface of Partition Wizard. It performed flawlessly and did so in a timely manner. I have nothing but praise for the developers of the application. If the PW application was developed by individuals as opposed to a huge corporation I would gladly offer a financial donation as my way of supporting their endeavor. I see no way to do that on the PW website but then again, I could have overlooked it.

I sincerely thank everyone who assisted me with my resizing efforts. Sharing your knowledge and time with a novice is something most people are not willing to do. It says a lot about your character. I have noticed much impatience, frustration and aggravation by others in many forums while attempting to assist a novice such as myself. I experienced none of that in this thread, which again attests to your character and genuine desire to share your knowledge. You have my respect and admiration.

I apologize if my rambling in any of my posts caused any consternation among you. That's my nature; I'm not only a reader but also a person who often talks too much.

C.B.

Dear CBM,

We were only anxious about you and your task...and be ready with any other advice you may need in time.

So our requests might have sounded as impatient demands. But in the end all of us were just waiting for you to finish the task and declare the results. so that we can say Yahoo.......

whs said:

Is everything in good order now??

Btw: at your tender age you have plenty of time to learn all that stuff. I started with the PC at age 70.

Everything is fine, whs, and the OS seems to be performing normally. The two main reasons I wanted to shrink the OS partition were to decrease read/write times and the time it took to do backups. I'm going to run an Acronis backup and Windows Backup and Restore backup soon so as to determine if the Acronis backup still takes two hours to complete and the Windows backup one hour to complete. I'm concerned with only one thing when I do a backup and that is the system image. I keep all my data on two external drives. Actually, I see no reason to purchase any more Acronis upgrades.

I'm going to start another thread, if one does not already exist, about any advantages to placing the page file on a partition other than the OS partition.

C.B.

rraod said:

Dear CBM,

We were only anxious about you and your task...and be ready with any other advice you may need in time.

So our requests might have sounded as impatient demands. But in the end all of us were just waiting for you to finish the task and declare the results. so that we can say Yahoo.......

I noticed no impatience, frustration or aggravation by any of those who assisted me in this thread. As I stated earlier, all of you have my respect and admiration.

C.B.

whs said:

CBM, there is absolutely no gain to be had by moving the pagefile. This file is used so rarely, that it is not worth worrying about it. Go to Resource Monitor > Memory tab on the bottom right is a graph that shows you the activity on the Pagefile (hard faults).

I really do not understand why your backups would take so long. How much data is in your OS Partition ?? My System backs up in about 12 minutes and restores in less than 20. But I use free Macrium. Maybe you should try it. Tutorial: Imaging with free Macrium

My Acronis backups always take appx. two hours and tech support at Acronis has never been able to determine why. The only thing I keep on my operating systems on all my computers are the program files; no pictures, no videos, no music, no nothing. My Acronis TIH 2012 seems to be incapable of backing up my email and once again, the Acronis techs can't understand why. My support request on this issue has been open for many weeks and has been bumped up to the senior tech level with no answer provided as of yet. I really don't think much of Acronis TIH. I use Paragon on the laptop. I'll look into Macrium. Thank you for the link.

I'll leave the page file where it is. I have not started a thread regarding this issue and will not do so.

C.B.

gregrocker said:

mjf said:

I'm not a Novice to Partition Wizard and have used it often.
However, I used for the first time the other day on my OS (Boot,...) partition to shrink it to a size able to accommodate an SSD. Sorry to say it moved files and screwed up! The MFT wasn't the issue.
I recovered from an image and completed the job. But take WHS's advice early in the thread and basically be prepared to recover from a PW foul up.

Also, if you ever invoke your factory recovery you'll be back to the old partition structure.

Did you use the PW CD? While we´ve had failures using PW installed version which must commit to RAM at reboot to complete tasks, I recall no failure reported in thousands of cases where PW CD has been used here to do both simple and complicated partitioning operations.

Please document thoroughly with screenshots any PW boot disk failures, as non-specific comments disparaging the most important tool we use here are not helpful and confuse the OP.

(1) I'm at least as technically competent in this area as you are. I also remind you that I am part of this forum so I like to think I am part of the "we".
(2) I provide advice all the time on using the live boot CD when doing partition operations and I tend to follow my own advice. Yes I used the boot CD.
(3) The comment was not "disparaging" it was a statement of fact. I provide advice all the time and if I had more to offer on this matter I would have provided it.
(4) I use Partition Wizard frequently and my advice was to never take a partition operation lightly and assume it could fail. What gives you the right to tell me this advice isn't helpful.

whs said:

CBM, there is absolutely no gain to be had by moving the pagefile. This file is used so rarely, that it is not worth worrying about it. Go to Resource Monitor > Memory tab on the bottom right is a graph that shows you the activity on the Pagefile (hard faults).

I really do not understand why your backups would take so long. How much data is in your OS Partition ?? My System backs up in about 12 minutes and restores in less than 20. But I use free Macrium. Maybe you should try it. Tutorial: Imaging with free Macrium

Hello again whs. I noticed this warning in the tutorial and I believe it applies to my situation with my Dell computers having the Recovery partition initiate the boot. I'm going to try it later today. I've had enough of Acronis, although I'm not going to badmouth the product.

Warning
The recovery instructions work perfectly well with a "traditional" installation where the bootmgr resides on the C partition. If, however, you have a seperate 100 or 200MB partition where the bootmgr resides (usually a hidden partition), then you must not mark the C partition as active. Rather mark the partition as primary or logical. Else, your restored system will become unbootable.

My OS partition is already marked as primary. I'll have to check the Macrium help menu and the user interface to determine the initial setting and whether or not I'll have to change anything.

C.B.