[Klug-general] Defragging Vista

[James Morris]

On 5 October 2010 08:37, James Morris <jwm.art.net at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

I should have mentioned I am about to try the clonezilla live CD,
which might be exactly what I need.

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