A few questions about partition resizing

Machine is a laptop running Vista Home Premium

I had a large partition that I resized using the Vista utility, from 138GB down to 96GB. That's all the further it would let me reduce it in size even though only about 15GB was actually used, the rest was free space. I wanted to make it even smaller, but Vista wouldn't let me.

Question 1) Is that because the Vista utility will only remove unused sectors, but won't take the next step of relocating files to utilize the allocated space more efficiently? Or is there something else I don't understand?

Question 2) Since DDS will allow me to shrink the partition down to the size that is actually used, I assume it must relocate the files to compact them into a smaller address space. Is that understanding correct, or is there more to it than that?

After reading the user manual I went into the automatic mode and resized the C: partition to make it a little smaller. The new partition size was applied, but the machine wouldn't boot. So I recovered it with an image I had just taken with True Image and it seems to be OK. But the image I had was using the old partition size, which was bigger than the new size. TI was aware of that and showed the before -> after partition sizes during the restore operation.

Question 3) As long as the partition size is large enough to support the actual data size used in a disk image, is there any reason you shouldn't try to restore an image to a partition of a different size than when the image was created? TI seemed to take it all in stride, so I assume this is OK to do, but would like confirmation on that.

Question 4) From further reading I learned that resizing the OS partition is better served using the Boot Disk, otherwise critical OS files can get trashed in the process. I'm assuming that's what caused my inability to reboot after doing the resizing without using the Boot Disk. Would that seem likely?

 

resizing follow-up after using boot disk

I tried to resize the C: partition again, this time using the boot disk.

In full mode it couldn't find the hard drive at all. Its a brand new laptop, so hopefully that problem will be solved in a later release of DDS.

In safe mode it found the disk, so I resized the partition.

After reboot Windows found some disk errors and ran chkdsk to fix them. It all scrolled by a little too fast for me to remember what problems it fixed, but there were several. It rebooted again and when it came up all seemed well, and the new partition size had taken effect.

Should I be concerned about the disk errors, or is this no big deal?

 

Re: resizing follow-up after using boot disk

If the drive checks out okay now, I think you should be okay. Vista does have limitations on how much it will shrink a partition. Half is usually about as far as it goes.

Did you run chkdsk before you resized the partition? It's possible some errors may have already existed.

My guess would be that it didn't boot correctly the first time because the BCD file information was incorrect (partition not found). When you restored with TI (did you use version 11?), it updated the BCD when it moved the starting sector. Then, when you tried the resize, the starting sector didn't change and Vista would still boot. If that's what happened, booting to the Vista DVD and doing a BCD repair would have fixed the original problem.

 

I had run chkdsk earlier and all was OK. But, just prior to this latest resizing I had defragged that partition and imaged it. I didn't run chkdsk after the defrag.

For now I think I'm going to put the partition back to the original size and reinstall the old image just to make sure I didn't corrupt some obscure file that rarely gets used. Just because I haven't noticed any symptoms yet doesn't necessarily mean I didn't break something, I just didn't break anything really important.

I'd like to create a smaller partition simply to keep my system partition small for backup imaging, and have more space allocated to data storage. I already have another partition for data storage so I don't really need to change the size immediately, so I'll leave it alone. Then later as the disk fills up I can resize it when I start to run low on data storage space.