Unusual problem shrinking drive size (enough space, but not enough space?)

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giantbucket

giantbucket

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so i have my Win8.1 installed on a 500G drive, and over time i've reduced the partition size since eventually i'd like to move the OS onto a smaller drive or an SSD (i know the benefits, no need to reiterate). but i've run into a weird problem:

the current OS partition is around 128G (after months of shrinking), and the OS takes up around 53G of that space. it's been defragged often (it's on a weekly schedule), and i've gone through the "Disk Cleanup" thing more than a dozen times.

when i go into Disk Management and try to shrink the volume, it says it can shrink it by a lot - typically by 60G or so which makes sense. but i can't actually shrink it by even 100 megs. sometimes i can manage 1-2 megs of shrink. yes, megs. as in, i can shrink it in floppy disk increments.

invariably the error message i get is "there is not enough space on the disk to complete this operation". it's a 500G drive, with a 128G OS partition and a 345G unallocated partition.

what can i do? i've turned off the page file, disabled hibernation, reduced the size of the system restore allowed space, ...

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OS-diskmanagement.png


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OS-shrinkerror.png
 
Solution
leo2kp
I don't know if my edit made it, but after looking at the error again, it looks like you might have file fragments sitting in the last 1GB section of the partition. Try Defraggler instead of Windows Defrag and then try to shrink.
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leo2kp

leo2kp

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My question is: how do you plan on transferring your OS and apps to a SSD? It looks like you're preparing to copy/paste it over, which won't work. You will need to reinstall Windows and your apps. As far as the error you're receiving, I'm not sure what's happening there, but with Windows, apps, and Windows Updates roll-back repository, it looks like you're at among the lowest drivespace usage I've seen on a Windows boot partition and probably can't go much lower than that. If you want to easily see what's using up that space, download a utility called WinDirStat.
 
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leo2kp

leo2kp

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I don't know if my edit made it, but after looking at the error again, it looks like you might have file fragments sitting in the last 1GB section of the partition. Try Defraggler instead of Windows Defrag and then try to shrink.
 
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gopher1369

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I'm assuming that he's going to clone the drive, not copy and paste. And my laptop has a way lower usage than that, I have a 64Gb SSD and am using up just over 20Gb of that. Turning off hibernate, system restore and the recycle bin you can easily get Windows under 20Gb.

Going back to the original question, I had the exact same issue trying to clone my 500Gb HDD onto a 128Gb SSD and could never manage it, and could never figure out why, so I'm hoping someone has the answer, because I'm intrigued (I gave up and did a fresh install).
 
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giantbucket

giantbucket

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um, Win8.1 has the built-in ability to create a system image, which i can save to any other drive and restore it onto a replacement drive. it's child's play - i've done it on 8 and 7 a few times. it keeps the install as-is with the apps and updates, no need for me to start from scratch. the problem is the inability to shrink the partition despite more than half of it being empty.

the 50G used isn't a problem. it's the fact that the 128G partition that it is on can't be reduced down to 118G (cuz it needs to be no larger than the replacement drive, which might be a 120G or a 128G or even my old reliable 60G that is just sitting around doing nothing). with all that empty space, it shouldn't complain about lack of space.
 
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gopher1369

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I use Clonezilla. You can use Clonezilla to clone directly from the HDD onto the SSD, much quicker than saving it onto a 3rd drive first, then and copying it back again.
 
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McHenryB

McHenryB

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Some files on the disk cannot be moved. Because of this you can't shrink the disk to the theoretical minimum as it must be big enough to accomodate the files in that fixed position. Some specialist partition management software that boots into DOS to do the resize can cope with this. Try the free offerings from Easus or Paragon.
 
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giantbucket

giantbucket

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holy crap! Defraggler took one run, and then my Shrink Volume went down to sub-100G without a single issue! woo-hoo! thanks for the advice!

:bounce:
 
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