Re: Dual boot GNU and Windows 7

[Piscium]

On 26 March 2011 16:52, Sebastian Tennant <address@hidden> wrote:

>> I remember reading a while back that resizing Windows Vista partitions with
>> Gparted can make it unbootable (XP should be fine though). Not sure if that
>> is still the case, or what is the deal for Windows 7.
>
> Funny, I just read something similar.  As a result I thought I'd try resizing
> using Windows' own disk tool and this is what it tells me:
>
>  "You cannot shrink a volume beyond the point where any unmovable files are
>  located."
>
>       Total size before shrink: 431938 MB
>  Size of available shrink space: 201358 MB
>        Total size after shrink: 230580 MB
>
> Can you believe it!
>
> The 35 GB of data actually on the disk is somehow distributed over 230 GB of
> disk space in such a way that none of the remaining 195 GB of empty space can
> be used for anything else.  How brain-damaged is that!

There is possibly a way to shrink further. You would need to move
files to the beginning of the disk before resizing. You could try
Mydefrag (www.mydefrag.com). You could after installing the tool
reboot your PC, press the F8 key to go into Safe Mode, then run
Mydefrag with the Data Monthly script. This may take a few hours to
run as in safe mode disk caching is disabled.

The reason for the safe mode is that less Windows services will be in
use, so the corresponding DLLs can be moved about. You may further
temporarily disable Windows hibernation and paging, reboot, and then
re-enable them after defragmentation. This will cause the paging and
hibernation files to hopefully be moved nearer the beginning of the
disk. PageDefrag can also be used for some files:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb897426

After all the defragging above then you can again try to resize,
hopefully you will get more free space.


>
> I'm actually wondering whether or not I should bother keeping Windows now.
>
>> Usually it is recommended to put swap towards the beginning of the disk as
>> disk access is faster. 4 GB may be excessive, I have 3 GB swap in mine and I
>> don't remember ever using more than 100 MB.
>
> Thanks for the tip.  I'll set aside 2 GB nearer the start of the disk.

Forgot to mention that in Linux the swap partition is used for
hibernation. So if you plan to use hibernation then the size of the
swap partition should be at least the same size of your RAM. Plus I
would add 10 MB as Gparted sometimes gives us less space that we ask
for.