[Klug-general] Defragging Vista

[James Morris]

On 5 October 2010 08:07, Karl Buckland <buckland.karl at googlemail.com> wrote:
> James,
>
> I'm slightly confused as to why you're so upset by how NTFS stores
> files, or why you're so desperate to get the files at 'the beginning'

I have roughly 19gb remaining within the windows partition, but I
can't shrink it any smaller than 70gb because of a handful of small
files at the end of the partition! All that wasted space is upsetting
when it could be used for good things! ie linux :-)


> I'm also a little confused by the options for backup you have in mind.
> Are you planning to re-install windows and then restore your personal
> files, or are you thinking of restoring all the files from the windows
> partition (system files and all)?


The latter, system files and data. I can't be sure where anything is
situated in the partition, so I need to backup everything.

Of course, I wouldn't need to do this if I could just shrink the
partition as much as needed.

> I would just, as Dan has advised, back up your important files, then
> use a gparted live CD to resize the NTFS partition. I've done it
> plenty of times with no issues whatsoever - it can take an hour or
> more for a large partition, but it works very nicely. I've also used
> it to copy a partition from one disk to another, and then resize it.

I'm not asking how to shrink a partition, I know how to do it in Linux
or Vista, but both have limitations - gparted destroys data, vista's
storage management tools refuses to destroy data!

I need to find how to backup an entire windows partition, system files
and user data. But unfortunately there is not enough room on the
laptop to make an 19gb backup so I need to make it on a separate
machine - which has more than enough drive space but it's all ext3
partitions.

I want to be sure that in the worst case scenario where the windows
partition is completely destroyed that the backup system will restore
it to working order (ie windows file attributes or restored correctly)
otherwise I would have just done a straight copy or tar -jcvf etc.


Thanks,
James.