XP Block: Sys files in the way.

XP box. Using 10G out of a 30G HD. I defragg'd the HD, but still have some files or fragments right at the tail end so that qtparted and ntfsresize only seem to be able to reduce by a meagre 0.6G. Just about enough for a Knoppix SWAP, but that's all.

So what can be done? Find a way to move these system files to somewhere near the middle of the disk? I'm stuck.

Strictly this is not about Knoppix, it's clearly a NTFS and windows problem, but obviously it's in the way of my getting Knoppix on the HD.

Anyone found a similar situation? Help appreciated. Thanks.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Facteur

Anyone found a similar situation? Help appreciated. Thanks.

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I'm in the exact same situation. Just found this, haven't tried it yet (seems as though goba's link, at the bottom of the page, helped your man).

Regards.

--EDIT: Be careful - as far as I can see, Partition Manager can only manage FAT partitions!!! Please do let me know if you find a solution.

Hi FlorianK

I suspected as much. I read your posts that came up in my searches.

I wouldn't rush to that conclusion re. nitrousracer ... it sounds as if he was reacting to the extra hope he was given, rather than his own test/trial of the Ranish tool. I must admit though, that the ranish website is looking good, better than it was 2 years ago when I lookedt this last (however that time though, I didnt resize, I just formatted the whole HD).

I've already done a XPPro NTFS resize, and after two defragments, I was successful. In that case, I was never getting actual XP SYS files pressing the ends of the HD like here in XPHome. So, it's not really about fragmentation, merely about SYS files being in the wrong place, all the time. I'm studying some WIN XP HD optimisation stuff now, to see if I can find out how to move them back.

I've tried a lot of optimisation stuff that didn't work. A lot of posts mention Diskeeper, the "Lite" version of which is XP's native defrag program. I've just downloaded the Pro version here, and I'll try it out now. I'll let you know whether that helped.

Regards.

-- EDIT: Nope, no go. Looks fancy, does nothing. Anything new from you, Facteur? I'd be really really grateful for a solution here.

-- EDIT2: Found a post that at least tells me where that huge MFT thing comes from. The same forum appears to offer a possible solution here, but that's for Win2K - not sure whether I'd be brave enough to try it on XP.

FlorianK

If you're using Diskeeper for XPPro, there is an option (in "scheduling" I think) which arranges a Paging File Defrag during the next boot.
In my XP Pro test, it worked for me (not brilliantly, but adequately).

For my XP Home, this doesn't exist, so I don't have that optiion at the moment. I apologise if you've tried that already.

I'm progressing far too slowly here, but I will post if I find some.

In the end, I've already started deleting stuff from my HD and defragmenting afterwards. Bu if I continue this to the bitter end, I'll end up deleting all Windows XP from the HD, which is ht emost brutal, but probably the best way of HD installing Knoppix.

Thanks for that hint, Facteur - I'm trapped with XP Home myself, and I've started removing stuff, too ... but here's a strange thing that happened to me over my (offline) weekend: desperate as I was, I thought I'd look at the partitioning features offered by my WinXP recovery cd. Put it in, booted up, looked around, did *nothing*. Booted up in XP again, and by M$ magic, my MFT had actually been moved right behind the file blocks! (Well, not quite right behind, but a fair bit "north" on the drive map.)

But TANSTAAFL - now my pagefile was behind the MFT again, way at the bottom on the drive map. Since it wasn't defragmented but in one solid block, I didn't think I'd get Diskeeper to move it (even though it does have the boot time defrag option for XP Home as well, only it's a bit hidden - "Change your settings", then "Set a boot time defragmentation" in Version 6).

So I fiddled around some more, to no avail - then I did the XP recovery boot thing again, and hey presto! The pagefile was moved ahead of the MFT. But *still*, qtparted refuses to resize the partition - it tells me that the drive is fragmented and I need to resize it to about 0,3 GB short of the total. On the shell, it says "Error: ms dos disk labels do not support partition names" - does that mean anything? The qtparted FAQ isn't much help on that issue ("I know, I'm working on it").

Now I think we're both nearing that threshold of desperation/frustration/courage where we decide to just wipe the hd, repartition the whole thing and (re-)install both XP and Knoppix. Before that happens, I'll wait around for any news from you, Facteur (or anyone with suggestions).

Best regards,

Florian.

Ok, I've no idea why this worked. Removed more stuff from the NTFS partition, tried again, failed again, removed another wee little program, tried again, it worked. So there I am now with my hands full of new partitions, a Debian install and no network connection - doh! But that's a story for a different thread (the very fact that you're reading this shows that my dual-boot works :D ). Just to tell you that it may be worth persevering. Qtparted is a wonderful program, I lost no data at all. Who needs PM? (I still did get the "labels" error message, and I had to hd-install about a zillion times, but qtparted worked absolutely fine.)

Hi FlorianK,

(Last few days, I've been hanging around Linux Questions, not here)

Good to hear you succeeded (even though it was simply replaced by another problem, No net conn:-)).

Can I conclude from your experience, that one must starting stripping XP Home down (deleting apps and stuff) so that proper resizing can take place?

In the meantime, I was on Usenet with this problem. Everybody just says, "Get Partition Magic". The problem is once you start with the Open SW stuff, you have to finish. I'd hate to go out and get PM at this late stage.

In fact, I have not done much since I talked last, mainly because I have another machine with VFAT and Knoppix, so there has been no rush.

Taking the above conclusion to be true, I'll start deleting unecessary apps from NTFS now. I will report back here for the benefit of other readers.

Hi Facteur,

good to hear from you again! I've not been doing much myself, because by now, GRUB doesn't allow me to boot into my Debian style installation at all anymore, and I don't have the time/nerve to go through another installation at the moment.
Please don't get me wrong - I wasn't saying that this deleting was a perfect way of doing it, it just worked for me. Also, I think you're right about not using PM - I've read & heard terrible stories about it wiping drives. And as I wrote, qtparted worked beautifully once I'd got my hd prepared.

Best of luck for your efforts!

P.S. If you choose the NTbootloader, does your WinXP also offer you three apparently similar, but in fact different ways of starting it? I have three lines in my boot loader that all refer to it, then comes GRUB (which doesn't work at the moment, but which I hope to fix soon). I can't # these lines out (or rather, [] them out) - seems to be "safe mode" or something. In the boot.ini, they refer to folders WINDOWS.0, WINDOWS.1, and WINDOWS. (Now I know this is an M$ problem, but it makes the dual boot procedure cleaner if we can find a way to remove these from the bootloader, no?)

Hi FlorianK,

Well I started to make a little more progress, but not through my new knowledge, but rather because I started to use the O&O Fragmenter, which seems to be much better than Diskeeper. I ran it, and the SYS files (which are the title of the thread) all moved back, whatever they were.

Now, I usually use NTFSRESIZE to reduce ntfs. I have entered QTPARTED, but although it looks nice, it never seems to tell me very much. I know the Knoppix CD version is kind of old, but even when I use it, it does not suggest new size points like NTFSRESIZE does (under "Options" I think). Also in NTFSRESIZE, all operations are tentative until you do a final write, while in QTPARTED, it is not so clear about that, so I don't use its "resize" function at all. If it was "test resize" well then maybe I would, but it doesn't. So I don't really see your attraction to the program. May be you just overlooked that, and it worked out well, so you're happy.

In terms of booting, I also find it's difficult to find clear info. I'm having trouble with lilo.conf on my other machine, so I'm still booting from FD. I have to sort it out though, so I've done diagram, let's see if I can get it up here:

http://www.optiforma.com/diskstruc.gif


The idea is to try and sort out what the lilo is, and what a bootloader is. My interpretation is that LILO is a program that write parameters (as defined in lilo.conf) to the MBR. The MBR is an OS independent sector of 512 bytes.

The boot loader is on the partition of the OS you want to boot. I never expect to touch this at all (although of course you have to get its directory address right.)

Anyhow I'm still working on it (I'm also kind of testing to see whether the diagram I included will come up on this post. If it doesn't (readers - if there are any of you) it's because it's been moved or something).

Anyhow I'll probably report back on a different post now about lilo, as my "SYS files in the way" problem is now over.

Readers, it's possible that the above diagram is incorrect. In terms of LILO, I experimented after I learnt that you can easily recover the old windows mbt settings using FDISK /MBR or FIXMBR. It's actually not such a big deal.
***End of topic***

There is a surprising lack of information on the web concerning moving NTFS MFT and System files to the front of the drive. I had this same goal so that I could install a Yoper (linux distro) installation on my WinXP drive, but the Knoppix.net forums were the most helpful.

Sorry to resurrect a dead thread, but I hope that my experience will help those in the future:

Steps:

1) Booted from the "Ultimate Boot CD 4 Windows" (www.ubcd4win.com) and ran the following from the command prompt:

Code:

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D:\programs\dirms\dirms.exe c move lcn

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(where c is the drive letter of my NTFS WinXP drive) This is an excellent defragging utility and compresses everything to the front of the drive EXCEPT MFT files. This alone gained me 4.66Gb of my 120Gb drive in Qtparted.

2) Used VoptXP (trialware) in WinXP to view the status of the drive. It shows the last used block on the drive much more visibly than Diskeeper or WinXP's defragger.

3) Used professional version (trialware) of Executive Software Diskeeper to "Set a boot-time defragmentation" with the following settings ON:

Schedule time: On next manual reboot
Put all folders together on the volume
Run CHKDSK before defragmentation
Defragment the paging file
Defragment the Master File Table (MFT)

4) Rebooted, CHKDSK ran once, rebooted automatically, Diskeeper ran for about 10 minutes, booted into Windows.

5) Ran VoptXP to see the improvement ... WHOA! Instead of 4Gb, I now have 44Gb free at the tail end of the drive (and only 53Gb free, so that's very compacted!!!)

6) Booted into Knoppix 3.6 and used Qtparted to resize the partition as I pleased.

7) Booted into Windows, ran CHKDSK just in case.

8) Voila! Two partitions!!!

Hope this helps someone!

Alternatively you could use Knoppix 3.7 or later. These releases include a much improved ntfsresize version (what qtparted, gparted, diskdrake, yast, evms and so on use to resize NTFS) that can move around anything without data loss. Actually it's pretty old, Knoppix has just forgotten to update it for over year: http://linux-ntfs.sourceforge.net/info/ntfsresize.html