Partition or Volume - Shrink

Brink said:

It may have just freed up some allocated space when you defragged and optimized it.

That would be nice... But I doubt it, because I had defragmented (the regular Defrag) more than 10 times at that point! I don't see why it would have freed up space on the 2nd "Defrag & Optimize"? Plus, that only lasted 30 secondes... And the screencaps, with the gray areas completely wiped, are a bit incriminating...

Brink said:

Have you noticed anything missing while going through your files, partitions, etc...?

I honestly have no idea. The laptop is new, and is my first encounter with Seven (I still use Windows XP on my older computer). I just have a few screencaps and text documents on it, plus the system files, which I am not familiar with at all...

Brink said:

Has anything changed in Disk Management?

No. C: is at 70 Go, and there's 391,7 Go unallocated.

Brink said:

I don't know what that program's optimization feature all includes or what it may delete, but it does say it will clean up your disks from junk files and fix system errors to make your PC run as fast as new from here.
(...) However, I don't think that it would have deleted any of your files though, just the usual temp file junk.

That's a feature of Auslogics Bootspeed, which I haven't installed. Although the free version of the defragmenter does tell you about the registry errors and junk files it finds in order to encourage you to purchase that product...

I've investigated a bit, and it looks like it's probably, hopefully, only my restore points that disappeared into thin air. Case in point:

1) There are only 3, and I think there used to be more...

2) Under 'Protection Settings', it says "Current use: 1,02 Go", "Max use: 5% = 3,5 Go"

3) I've looked at the entire event logs, and the only thing that seemed out of the ordinary were 12 volsnap events:
* the first 11, Information events with ID Event 33, said "The oldest shadow copy of volume C: was deleted to keep disk space usage for shadow copies of volume C: below the user defined limit."
* the twelfth, an Error event with Event ID 36, said "The shadow copies of volume C: were aborted because the shadow copy storage could not grow due to a user imposed limit."

Here's some stuff I've found about those events:

Event ID: 33 Source: VolSnap says:

When you run Disk Defragmenter on a volume with shadow copies activated, all or some of your shadow copies may be lost, starting with the oldest shadow copies

Same website for Event ID: 36 Source: VolSnap

And at MS: Event ID 33 and Event ID 36

The last message on The case of the missing System Restore Points: Windows 7 64-bit 7100 links to a MS article about Event IDs 25, 22 and 8183 and explains:

My problem was solved by kb article 2506576. Relates to IO bootup problems. Summary is to delete hyberfil.sys and pagefile.sys as well. Then defrag,restore,reboot. That was my problem - hyberfil.sys was somehow fragmented or corrupted.....

As for my own case... The timeline is still weird. The volsnap events occurred between 5:41 pm and 9:28 pm; but according to Auslogics Disk Defrag, those 8 Go were miraculously freed at 9:46 pm. Hmmm...

And I don't know what the actual culprit is... The use of Auslogics Disk Defrag, or my messing with the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys...

Well... I hope after I restore those two, I won't run into this problem again. And I'm certainly never using that defragmenter again!

I'm not completely done investigating anyway. Next, I'm gonna try to check if the various applications still work.

To be continued!

Me again! Okay, all the software seems to be working fine.

Any tests I forgot?

Excellent! Thank you, Brink. Leaving you alone now!

I am having problems with the command line. After I type diskpart in an elevated command line, it gives me the diskpart version, copyright, and the version but it doesnt give me:
DISKPART>

I wonder what's wrong. I am trying to shrink my C drive and then partition it so I can install Ubuntu and then dual boot with already installed windows 7. I am having a hard time in shrinking C drive from Disk Management also.

Actually, I was able to get this working by going into the regular command line, and then typing diskpart which prompted me to open a elevated command prompt and it opened it with DISKPART>