partitiion size for 64 bit fix1?

[bad sector]

I had w7 on 20gb's which wasn't enough to apply fix1, so I reinstalled
to 30gb and it's STILL not enough! Can I make an image of this install
and mirror it back later to a bigger partition and then expand the
filesystem as with reiserfs? Not interested in any 3rdpartyware.

Would a 40gb partition size be enough?

What the hell is this pig doing with all the real estate???

 

[Paul]

I had w7 on 20gb's which wasn't enough to apply fix1, so I reinstalled
to 30gb and it's STILL not enough! Can I make an image of this install
and mirror it back later to a bigger partition and then expand the
filesystem as with reiserfs? Not interested in any 3rdpartyware.

Would a 40gb partition size be enough?

What the hell is this pig doing with all the real estate???

I use a 40GB partition now for Win7 SP1 x64. And I think my
current C: is approx 26GB full. I've turned off System Restore.
Nothing else goofy that comes to mind. The thing is, when the
partition is that small, and you take a fixed percentage of
that for System Restore, it probably isn't going to be that
useful anyway. By turning it off, it tends to stay at 26GB.

I also enabled indexing, but put the index on another
partition. At least Microsoft allowed me to move that.

I would have liked to move all VSS (volume shadow service)
functions to the other partition too, but Win7 is missing
the necessary "transport" code to do it. My objective in
all this, is to make the Win7 C: as robust to multi-booting
other OSes, as my previous OSes like WinXP are. I can boot a
Linux LiveCD on my WinXP machine, without having to live in fear
it won't boot again. Twice now, I've had Windows 7 stop booting.
The first time, the repair wouldn't work and I had to restore
from backup. The second time, the repair worked, but caused
heart stoppage and hair loss in the process, because the repair
didn't work right away. It required "coaxing" with a stick.

As for the "pig" aspect, it could actually be worse The
OS makes use of hard linking, where multiple file system pointers,
point to the same data clusters. So the file system is in fact
conserving resources. You have to be careful, when using Explorer
and measuring folder sizes, that you're not double counting
storage space. If there are hard linked files within a folder,
and you measure the size of multiple folders, the actual space
used could be smaller than the arithmetic sum of all the
folder sizes. As a result, if you were to delete the "store", which
is a repository of parts of the OS, you actually save very little
space, because most of the files in there are hard linked, and there
are multiple file pointers in various places.

Apparently, nothing is cleaned up. When you install a security
patch, the versions of stuff accumulate in the store. If you
install a service pack, apparently there is logic to remove
*some* of the stuff, but not all of it (I ran disk cleanup,
after doing SP1, and used the option there, and didn't save
that much space). It's not like there is a threshold function
that says "well, obviously this is too old". It could be more
like "we have this list of known removable files", in which case
the savings are rather limited by the imagination of the person
making the list.

Your machine contains files for all versions of the OS. If you're
running Premium, there are files for Ultimate stored on there.
If you do an "Anytime Upgrade", the new license key, enables
those files and makes them useful (hard links are forged, to
the destinations requiring the files). So it's very much a
"garbage dump" design, which seems to have entirely ignored the
need to work with small and cheap SSD drives (where you don't
really want that garbage dump). Maybe they could have come up
with another scheme, like "hot" files stay on C:, while "copies
of the newspaper from 1908", stay on a second partition of the
user's choosing. Like on a slow hard drive, rather than the
primo space on the SSD.

So set it to 40GB, grit your teeth, and try again

As for shrinking and expanding, you can try doing that
from Disk Management. The shrinking function is limited, because
Microsoft doesn't know how to move the metadata on C:. I don't know
if the expand function has limits. I think I originally shrank C:
to 30GB (before installing SP1), but expanded back to 40GB and then
did SP1 without incident. So that means, I must have used the
built-in Disk Management function for that. I don't generally
buy software these days - I'd rather spend the money on other
things, like car repairs :-(

Paul

 

[Char Jackson]

I had w7 on 20gb's which wasn't enough to apply fix1,

What is fix1? Is that Service Pack 1 (SP1) or is it something else?

so I reinstalled to 30gb and it's STILL not enough!

What makes you think so? What error message are you getting? Assuming
your 20GB installation was 100% full, (probably a bad assumption),
expanding the partition to 30GB would give you 10GB free which is way
more than SP1 needs.

Can I make an image of this install
and mirror it back later to a bigger partition and then expand the
filesystem as with reiserfs? Not interested in any 3rdpartyware.

A backup is always a good idea before messing with disk partitions,
but the rest of the tasks you mentioned can be done by the built in
Disk Management app.

Would a 40gb partition size be enough?

I would say just about any partition size is cool as long as you have
a few Gigs free.

What the hell is this pig doing with all the real estate???

Are you sure Windows is complaining about the size of your primary
system partition? Is it possible it's trying to use the tiny 200MB
boot partition as a temp working space?

(I'm using my own definitions of system and boot, above.)

 

[bad sector]

Thank you both Paul & Char, I'll answer you this way for now.

Since I posted I resized the partition to 45gb with linux fdisk. It
boots fine but as far as w7 thinks its still on 30gb though disk manager
does show it as 45gb. There's no expand option that I can find so I
tried tricking it to reduce from 45gb by 1mb ..that didn't work.

I don't know Windows-7 at all, I've had it installed for a year for
someone else and am for my own limited needs upgrading to XP but need
this Windows-7 running and with service packs applied if possible.

The size shortage came up when I tried to apply service pack 1, as I
said, which was the reason to increase to 30gb which still ended up
short with a message along the lines of "you need 9gb".

There's no separate boot partition, it's all on primary #2. Primary #1
is 4gb and has XP on it very comfortably (when I want XP on there).

#2 is now 45gb so I either find a clean and bulletproof way to expand
the filesystem to parttition size or reinstall.

 

[Paul]

Thank you both Paul & Char, I'll answer you this way for now.

Since I posted I resized the partition to 45gb with linux fdisk. It
boots fine but as far as w7 thinks its still on 30gb though disk manager
does show it as 45gb. There's no expand option that I can find so I
tried tricking it to reduce from 45gb by 1mb ..that didn't work.

I don't know Windows-7 at all, I've had it installed for a year for
someone else and am for my own limited needs upgrading to XP but need
this Windows-7 running and with service packs applied if possible.

The size shortage came up when I tried to apply service pack 1, as I
said, which was the reason to increase to 30gb which still ended up
short with a message along the lines of "you need 9gb".

There's no separate boot partition, it's all on primary #2. Primary #1
is 4gb and has XP on it very comfortably (when I want XP on there).

#2 is now 45gb so I either find a clean and bulletproof way to expand
the filesystem to parttition size or reinstall.

So I think what you're telling me, is you've modified the MBR parameters,
to show a larger partition. Sorta like this picture. The thing is, doing this,
doesn't cause the NTFS file system to expand to fill the space. It's
like a sausage skin, without enough meat in it. Logically, the
parameters maintained by the file system, still say "30GB".

+-----+------------------+--------------+
| MBR | 30GB formatting 15GB "space" |
| | added on end |
+-----+---------------------------------+

I would:

1) Go back to fdisk, and undo the change. Put back the exact original
value (you wrote it down, right ?). If you don't know what that
value is, then using package manager, get a copy of TestDisk, have
it scan and recompute the correct value. Not all distros, have TestDisk
built-in, in which case you'll have to install it. Get it to write
out a new MBR (and pray you did it right). If you wrote down the original
value, then fdisk is sufficient.

2) Boot Windows 7 and go to Disk Management.
You can try typing diskmgmt.msc in the Start thing, as
a command to get Disk Management running. I start Disk Management
in three different OSes that way (win2K, winxp, win7). If it gives
you a hard time, right click after the search finds it, and do
"Run as Administrator".

3) Once in Disk Management, increase the size of C: as you see fit. You'd
want something like this, just before expanding in Disk Management.
Now that your MBR is fixed, this is how it should look.

+-----+------------------+--------------+
| MBR | 30GB formatted | unallocated |
| | | |
+-----+------------------+--------------+

In this picture, you can see the Disk Management offers "Extend Volume"
and "Shrink Volume". What that *should* do, is properly expand the
file system. It'll change the MBR for you, and it will also logically
expand the formatting of the file system within the newly sized space.

http://www.techfuels.com/attachment...6-resize-partition-free-windows-7-vista-2.jpg

If you were a Linux buff, you could also use GParted to attempt
something like this, but I don't know how safe that is with a
Windows 7 volume. My batting average screwing around with
Win7 C: isn't too good so far. I advise a conservative
approach, such as "backing up before doing brain surgery".
I've already bailed out of one mess, by using my backup made
moments before (lucky, really). If you can get the Disk Management
function to work, it's bound to be safer than GParted.

Paul

 

[bad sector]

bad sector wrote:

So I think what you're telling me, is you've modified the MBR parameters,
to show a larger partition. Sorta like this picture. The thing is, doing
this,
doesn't cause the NTFS file system to expand to fill the space. It's
like a sausage skin, without enough meat in it. Logically, the
parameters maintained by the file system, still say "30GB".

+-----+------------------+--------------+
| MBR | 30GB formatting 15GB "space" |
| | added on end |
+-----+---------------------------------+

Yes, if it were a reiserfs system I would only need to do

resize_reiserfs /dev/sda2

and it would be all over in 30 seconds.

I would:

1) Go back to fdisk, and undo the change. Put back the exact original

2) Boot Windows 7 and go to Disk Management.

3) Once in Disk Management, increase the size of C: as you see fit. You'd
want something like this, just before expanding in Disk Management.
Now that your MBR is fixed, this is how it should look.

I may do this, I always keep partition tables and iso images of
partitions going back a few generations

Is it possible to repartition with windows using sector level precision?
The disk is not using the 2048 sector root imposed & enforced by the new
fdisk so it might be possible but I've never used windows' DM.

The old
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 8401994 4200966 1b Hidden W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 8401995 71316554 31457280 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 71316555 134231114 31457280 83 Linux

The new
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 8401994 4200966 1b Hidden W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 8401995 102773834 47185920 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 102773835 197145674 47185920 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 197145675 3907029167 1854941746+ 5 Extended

The above is how the first 2 partitions look right now and I'd want to
end up with exactly the same start/end/blockcount. I should be able to
revert #2 to the old size and temporarilty unallocate 71316555 to
102773834 which DM might then offer as a ready option (just guessing).

+-----+------------------+--------------+
| MBR | 30GB formatted | unallocated |
| | | |
+-----+------------------+--------------+

In this picture, you can see the Disk Management offers "Extend Volume"
and "Shrink Volume". What that *should* do, is properly expand the
file system. It'll change the MBR for you, and it will also logically
expand the formatting of the file system within the newly sized space.

http://www.techfuels.com/attachment...6-resize-partition-free-windows-7-vista-2.jpg


If you were a Linux buff, you could also use GParted to attempt
something like this, but I don't know how safe that is with a

Funy you should mention that, hehehe, whenever I get to needing
partitioning it's not a time to experiment anymore so I've never dared
to try parted either. I prefer the precision fdisk gives me and use it
in strict spanish mode (e'manuel).

Thanks for the detailed guidance!

 

[Paul]

Yes, if it were a reiserfs system I would only need to do

resize_reiserfs /dev/sda2

and it would be all over in 30 seconds.





I may do this, I always keep partition tables and iso images of
partitions going back a few generations

Is it possible to repartition with windows using sector level precision?
The disk is not using the 2048 sector root imposed & enforced by the new
fdisk so it might be possible but I've never used windows' DM.

The old
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 8401994 4200966 1b Hidden W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 8401995 71316554 31457280 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 71316555 134231114 31457280 83 Linux

The new
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 63 8401994 4200966 1b Hidden W95 FAT32
/dev/sda2 * 8401995 102773834 47185920 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
/dev/sda3 102773835 197145674 47185920 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 197145675 3907029167 1854941746+ 5 Extended

The above is how the first 2 partitions look right now and I'd want to
end up with exactly the same start/end/blockcount. I should be able to
revert #2 to the old size and temporarilty unallocate 71316555 to
102773834 which DM might then offer as a ready option (just guessing).



Funy you should mention that, hehehe, whenever I get to needing
partitioning it's not a time to experiment anymore so I've never dared
to try parted either. I prefer the precision fdisk gives me and use it
in strict spanish mode (e'manuel).

Thanks for the detailed guidance!

Things used to be so simple...

At one time, the tools I used, would tend to align to cylinders. And
that would involve multiples of 63, and perhaps even a one cylinder
gap between partitions.

Now, Windows 7 has some capability of working with SSD drives, and
that involves power_of_two sector counts (that's to make writes to
Flash chips efficient). So maybe it aligns to MiB instead of cylinders.
The thing is, when I was shrinking and expanding my Windows 7 system
(laptop), it's a "pure" environment with no other OS partitions, so
it really didn't matter to me what it was aligning to. The alignment
only had to keep Windows 7 happy.

I notice Linux has changed too, but I can't say right off hand,
what it's doing. Maybe you know the answer to that. I don't
know if they've gone "4K" to handle advanced format disks.
I didn't notice the old "align to multiples of 63" any more.

All I know for sure, is it's a big mess. I can pretty well
be assured, that if I was to fire up Partition Magic, it
would be most unhappy with the output of most of those
setups (i.e. refuse to work on them, because of how the
alignment is done). So it's pretty hard now, to move from
one environment to the other, and keep them all happy.

Paul

 

[Char Jackson]

The size shortage came up when I tried to apply service pack 1, as I
said, which was the reason to increase to 30gb which still ended up
short with a message along the lines of "you need 9gb".

There's no separate boot partition, it's all on primary #2. Primary #1
is 4gb and has XP on it very comfortably (when I want XP on there).

In addition to what Paul said, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that
Windows is complaining about not enough disk space because it's trying
to put temp files on your XP partition and there isn't enough room
there.

 

[J. P. Gilliver (John)]

On 11/13/2011 11:10 PM, Paul wrote: []

+-----+------------------+--------------+
| MBR | 30GB formatting 15GB "space" |
| | added on end |
+-----+---------------------------------+ []
+-----+------------------+--------------+
| MBR | 30GB formatted | unallocated |
| | | |
+-----+------------------+--------------+

[]
Your Thunderbird is cutting strings of two or more spaces down to one
space when quoting, which is spoiling Paul's nice pictures (-:
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/<1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"Everyone has always regarded any usage but his own as either barbarous or
pedantic." - Evelyn Waugh, quoted by Lynne Truss in "Eats, shoots & Leaves"
2003

 

[Paul]

On 11/13/2011 11:10 PM, Paul wrote: []

+-----+------------------+--------------+
| MBR | 30GB formatting 15GB "space" |
| | added on end |
+-----+---------------------------------+ []
+-----+------------------+--------------+
| MBR | 30GB formatted | unallocated |
| | | |
+-----+------------------+--------------+

[]
Your Thunderbird is cutting strings of two or more spaces down to one
space when quoting, which is spoiling Paul's nice pictures (-:

If you think that's bad, you should see what the Google archive
does to some of my ASCII art. (That is, when the Google
archive actually works.)

Paul

 

[bad sector]

Things used to be so simple...

At one time, the tools I used, would tend to align to cylinders. And
that would involve multiples of 63, and perhaps even a one cylinder
gap between partitions.

Now, Windows 7 has some capability of working with SSD drives, and
that involves power_of_two sector counts (that's to make writes to
Flash chips efficient). So maybe it aligns to MiB instead of cylinders.
The thing is, when I was shrinking and expanding my Windows 7 system
(laptop), it's a "pure" environment with no other OS partitions, so
it really didn't matter to me what it was aligning to. The alignment
only had to keep Windows 7 happy.

I reinstalled BTW, SP1 went on following, see my rteply to Char

I notice Linux has changed too, but I can't say right off hand,
what it's doing. Maybe you know the answer to that. I don't
know if they've gone "4K" to handle advanced format disks.
I didn't notice the old "align to multiples of 63" any more.

As I said I know next to nothing about microsoft innards. As far as
linux goes the fdisk has been changed to start with sector 2048 which as
I understand will make alignement easier (don't have any SSD). I had to
haul out an old version to partition the disk I have shown beginning
with sector 63. As far as I have 'heard' windows has not adopted the
2048 starting sector.

All I know for sure, is it's a big mess.
YES!

I can pretty well
be assured, that if I was to fire up Partition Magic, it
would be most unhappy with the output of most of those
setups (i.e. refuse to work on them, because of how the
alignment is done). So it's pretty hard now, to move from
one environment to the other, and keep them all happy.

I wouldn't know, these are technical tidbits that will sort themselves
out. What really ticks me is the GUI tendency I see developping in w7 as
well as linux KDE to some extent. There seems to be a will to isolate
the user from the real world in which IMHO an OS is still just a
glorified file manager which should behave like the window on a slide
rule and churn data at blistering speed but never have room for storing
it. The storage including backups restorepoints and whatever MS calls
them should all be elsewhere. There also seems to be this trend to turn
every PC into a huge black cherry where everything is virtualized and
real and fully qualified paths become imaginary, useless and misleading
links like MyFamilyTree & MyChickenCoop. CRAP!

Cheers

 

[bad sector]

In addition to what Paul said, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that
Windows is complaining about not enough disk space because it's trying
to put temp files on your XP partition and there isn't enough room
there.

That scared me, it's gotten to the point where nothing would surprise me
anymore so I chickened out and just reinstalled. There was 9.92G free
out of 44.9 and SP1 went on making it 7.75 free out of 44.9. No big deal
since there had been very little tweaking done before other than
returning what could be returned to classic style and menus.

 

[Paul]

That scared me, it's gotten to the point where nothing would surprise me
anymore so I chickened out and just reinstalled. There was 9.92G free
out of 44.9 and SP1 went on making it 7.75 free out of 44.9. No big deal
since there had been very little tweaking done before other than
returning what could be returned to classic style and menus.

Do you have System Restore running ? You seem to have a larger
C: than I've got on the laptop (about 26GB of 40GB, give or take).
Maybe some of that is restore points or something ?

If you're happy with SP1, you can go to Disk Cleanup and there
is an option to remove files from pre-SP1. It'll make a tiny
difference. Whereas, turning System Restore off and then on
again, should make more of a difference.

Paul

 

[bad sector]

bad sector wrote:

Do you have System Restore running ? You seem to have a larger
C: than I've got on the laptop (about 26GB of 40GB, give or take).
Maybe some of that is restore points or something ?

If you're happy with SP1, you can go to Disk Cleanup and there
is an option to remove files from pre-SP1. It'll make a tiny
difference. Whereas, turning System Restore off and then on
again, should make more of a difference.

System Restore was ON, I found how to kill it but the bigie was the
swap. I have 16gb RAM and from what I've been able to tell MS still
follows the swap=ram dogma which as far I'm concerned went out with
Humphrey Bogart and crooked hats

This default handling ended with w7 + sp1 on 44.9gb with 7.75gb free.
Nixing "restore" and things took it to 8.32gb but taking swap from
system-managed (16+gb) down to 2gb brought in 23.5gb free!

So now I'm wondering if I should look for a way to backlevel everything
to around 24gb as partition size. Think I'll just leave it in case the
next fixpack wants 1tb of disk space! Ticks me off, 2 days I've been
pissing around with this thing ..for someone else cause I don't even use
it

 

[Paul]

System Restore was ON, I found how to kill it but the bigie was the
swap. I have 16gb RAM and from what I've been able to tell MS still
follows the swap=ram dogma which as far I'm concerned went out with
Humphrey Bogart and crooked hats

This default handling ended with w7 + sp1 on 44.9gb with 7.75gb free.
Nixing "restore" and things took it to 8.32gb but taking swap from
system-managed (16+gb) down to 2gb brought in 23.5gb free!

So now I'm wondering if I should look for a way to backlevel everything
to around 24gb as partition size. Think I'll just leave it in case the
next fixpack wants 1tb of disk space! Ticks me off, 2 days I've been
pissing around with this thing ..for someone else cause I don't even use
it

I'd just leave it. Microsoft will find a way to fill that 44.9GB.

Paul