Windows 10 does not shrink the volume. Information compression and incompressible files

Using Disk Management, you can reduce the size of your hard drive volume to create a new partition.

Windows 7 includes several tools to manage your computer's configuration and various aspects of the operating system. Sometimes it is necessary to reduce the size of a volume - distributed space on a hard drive - to free up space to create another partition. Until recently, this would have required the use of third-party utilities, but with the advent of the built-in Disk Management tool in Windows 7, the need to install special software has disappeared.

Volume compression

First, you need to run Disk Management with administrator rights. Open the Start menu, type “diskmgmt.msc” into the search bar without quotes, right-click the “diskmgmt” link in the search results and select the “Run as Administrator” option from the context menu (Figure A).

Figure A: Run Disk Management with Administrator rights.

The window shown in Fig. will open. B.

Figure B. Disk Management window.

As you can see, my computer has a data recovery partition, a system partition, and a Data partition. It’s better not to touch the system partition, so for example, let’s shrink the “Data (D:)” partition.

Right-click on the partition you want to shrink and select the Shrink Volume option (Figure C).

Figure C: From the context menu, select the Shrink Volume option.

The system will take a few seconds to analyze the disk, and the dialog box shown in Fig. 1 will appear. D.

Figure D. Based on the analysis results, a dialog box appears with general information about the volume.

In this window, you can only change the value in the “Amount of Space to Shrink in MB” field. For example, let's reduce volume “D:” by 5000 MB (5 GB), as shown in Fig. E. When you're ready, click the Compress button.

Figure E: Shrink a 5000 MB volume.

Once the operation is complete, there will be new unallocated space on your hard drive (Figure F). Its actual size will be slightly less than what was indicated during compression, since a small part of this space will be allocated to the Windows file system.

Figure F. New unallocated space.

Using Unallocated Space

Now you need to create a partition on the unallocated space that the operating system can use. This is not at all difficult, but it is done in several stages, so I will talk about creating a new volume in the next article.

Starting with Vista and 7, the Windows operating system has a feature that allows you to shrink (or expand) the size of the main partition and logical drives. This feature can be useful if you find yourself in a situation where you need an additional partition and don't have enough additional disks. By shrinking the volume, you will free up disk space; this unallocated space can then be used to create other necessary partitions. Today we will learn how to shrink a basic volume or partition using the Windows GUI, and for more advanced users we will also describe a method using the command line.

Before you begin, make sure you have backed up all your important data.

Shrink a volume or partition using Disk Management

If you have Windows 7, go to the Start menu, type “disk management” in the search box and press Enter. If you are a Windows 8.x user, right-click in the lower left corner of the screen (or press Win+X) and select Disk Management.

"Disk Management" is where you will find all the drives connected to your computer (hard drives, USB drives, CD/DVDs, etc.)

Select the primary partition you want to compress, right-click on it and select Compress.

As a result, the operating system will begin the process of determining available space for compression.

Specify the amount of space you would like to regain and click "Compress". Remember that the amount of space is entered in megabytes: for example, 1 GB is equal to 1024 MB.

You can use the space freed (or unoccupied) in this way to create a new partition.

Shrink a volume or partition using the command line

To open Command Prompt in Windows 7, go to the Start menu, type "cmd", right-click cmd.exe in the search results and select "Run as administrator". In Windows 8.x, right-click in the lower left corner of the screen and select Command Prompt (Admin).
Enter diskpart and press Enter.

In the DISKPART line, enter list volume. This command will display a list of all drives on the computer.

Now enter the select volume command and the volume number you want to shrink. For example, enter select volume 1 and press Enter.

Enter shrink querymax and press Enter. This command will allow Windows to determine the maximum amount of space that can be compressed.

Now you have two options: firstly, you can simply enter shrink, and then Windows will shrink all available space; secondly, you can specify the desired volume to be compressed. In the second case, you need to enter the command shrink desired=volume_in_megabytes (for example, shrink desired=2048). You can enter any number that does not exceed the value specified in the "Maximum number of reused bytes" line. So with this command you can specify the exact amount of space to be compressed.

If you do everything correctly, after the operation is completed you will see a message:

DiskPart successfully shrunk the volume by: number_in_megabytes

That's all! To shut down DISKPART correctly, enter exit and press Enter.

Things to consider:

• When you try to shrink a primary partition or logical drive, you will not be able to shrink the partition beyond the area where non-movable files are located (for example, the shadow copy storage area, hibernation, page files, etc.) Let's assume if there is a "first" empty space on the Windows drive and then there are non-movable files followed by a "second" empty space, you will only be able to shrink the partition to the end of the second empty space since there are non-movable files in the middle.
• If a large number of bad clusters are detected, the compression will fail.
• You can use compression for primary partitions and logical drives or partitions with the NTFS file system.

Have a great day!

Good day. Today we’ll look at a fairly popular topic for beginners, this is working with already created hard drive partitions (you’ve already bought a new hard drive?:) and we’ll look at operations such as reducing the volume (compression) of the hard drive and expanding it using unallocated area. To do this, we will not use any third-party programs, but will use the Disk Management utility built into the Windows operating system. So, why might we need this knowledge? Suppose you initially had it on your hard drive, but over time you decided that one is enough to store movies, music and photos, it’s easier to search :) Or another case, you have two local drives on your hard drive (let’s assume 2Tb), one for system (local drive C), the second for personal data (drive D), but when you partitioned them, you left too little space for drive C and this constantly creates discomfort for you. It is to solve such situations that this article was written.

In this article I will do, sequentially:
— Compression (reduction) of the local disk,
— Expansion (increase) of the local disk due to a new unallocated area.

This is what we need.

1) The first thing we need is to open the Disk Management utility. For the lucky owners of Windows 8.1 and 8, just right-click on the “Start” button (or in the lower left corner of the desktop for Windows 8) and select “Disk Management”. Everyone else needs to go to “Control Panel → System and Security → Administrative Tools → Computer Management → Storage Devices → Disk Management.”

3) Right-click on the partition on the right side of the window and select “Shrink Volume”.

4) A dialog box will open asking you to select the volume to compress. This window shows the current partition size, available (unused) space for compression, and the size of the local disk after compression, in megabytes. To maximize disk compression, you must defragment the partition before this operation. I'm using an empty disk, so I have almost all of its capacity available for compression. Enter the required number of megabytes in the “Size of compressed space” line and click “Compress”.

6) Now we will expand the partition using this unallocated area. To do this, right-click on the partition and select “Extend volume”.

7) The “Volume Expansion Wizard” will open, click next.

This page shows the available and selected unallocated areas, and you can also specify how much of the unallocated area should be used to expand the local disk (item “Select the size of the allocated space”). I use the entire volume, you look at your circumstances.

Starting with Vista and 7, the Windows operating system has a feature that allows you to shrink (or expand) the size of the main partition and logical drives. This feature can be useful if you find yourself in a situation where you need an additional partition and don't have enough additional disks. By shrinking the volume, you will free up disk space; this unallocated space can then be used to create other necessary partitions. Today we will learn how to shrink a basic volume or partition using the Windows GUI, and for more advanced users we will also describe a method using the command line.

Before you begin, make sure you have backed up all your important data.

Shrink a volume or partition using Disk Management

If you have Windows 7, go to the Start menu, type “disk management” in the search box and press Enter. If you are a Windows 8.x user, right-click in the lower left corner of the screen (or press Win+X) and select Disk Management.

"Disk Management" is where you will find all the drives connected to your computer (hard drives, USB drives, CD/DVDs, etc.)

Select the primary partition you want to compress, right-click on it and select Compress.

As a result, the operating system will begin the process of determining available space for compression.

Specify the amount of space you would like to regain and click "Compress". Remember that the amount of space is entered in megabytes: for example, 1 GB is equal to 1024 MB.

You can use the space freed (or unoccupied) in this way to create a new partition.

Shrink a volume or partition using the command line

To open Command Prompt in Windows 7, go to the Start menu, type "cmd", right-click cmd.exe in the search results and select "Run as administrator". In Windows 8.x, right-click in the lower left corner of the screen and select Command Prompt (Admin).
Enter diskpart and press Enter.

In the DISKPART line, enter list volume. This command will display a list of all drives on the computer.

Now enter the select volume command and the volume number you want to shrink. For example, enter select volume 1 and press Enter.

Enter shrink querymax and press Enter. This command will allow Windows to determine the maximum amount of space that can be compressed.

Now you have two options: firstly, you can simply enter shrink, and then Windows will shrink all available space; secondly, you can specify the desired volume to be compressed. In the second case, you need to enter the command shrink desired=volume_in_megabytes (for example, shrink desired=2048). You can enter any number that does not exceed the value specified in the "Maximum number of reused bytes" line. So with this command you can specify the exact amount of space to be compressed.

If you do everything correctly, after the operation is completed you will see a message:

DiskPart successfully shrunk the volume by: number_in_megabytes

That's all! To shut down DISKPART correctly, enter exit and press Enter.

Things to consider:

• When you try to shrink a primary partition or logical drive, you will not be able to shrink the partition beyond the area where non-movable files are located (for example, the shadow copy storage area, hibernation, page files, etc.) Let's assume if there is a "first" empty space on the Windows drive and then there are non-movable files followed by a "second" empty space, you will only be able to shrink the partition to the end of the second empty space since there are non-movable files in the middle.
• If a large number of bad clusters are detected, the compression will fail.
• You can use compression for primary partitions and logical drives or partitions with the NTFS file system.

Now I want to show you how you can use the unallocated space on your disk and create a new volume or partition using the Disk Management tool or using the Command Prompt.

How to create a new volume or partition through Disk Management

Open the Disk Management tool. To do this, open the Run dialog (Win + R), enter the command diskmgmt.msc and press Enter.

Right-click on the unallocated space and click Create Simple Volume.

In the Create Simple Volume Wizard window, click Next.

Enter the amount of space you want to use for the new volume (or partition) and click Next.

In the next step, you can change the formatting options, but this is not necessary, especially if you are happy with the default settings. Additionally, you can change the volume label to any name you prefer, but it's better to use something descriptive: for example, "Movies", "Documents", "Backups", etc. You can also enable the option to compress files and folders. When all settings are selected, click Next.

Review your selections. If you want to change anything, click "Back" to return to the previous steps. If you are happy with everything, click "Done".

After this, a new partition should be successfully created on your computer.

How to create a new volume or partition via the command line

Open a command prompt with administrator rights.

Enter diskpart and press Enter.

In the DISKPART line, enter list disk. This command will list the drives on your PC. It will also help you determine the disk number with unallocated space.

Now enter the command select disk with the volume number and press Enter: for example, select volume 0 .

Advice: you can manually specify the size of the new partition. To do this, contact the team create partition primary need to add size=x(Where x– partition size in megabytes). The entire command will look like this: create partition primary size=1000

Now that the partition has been created, enter the command list volume and press Enter. As a result, you will see a volume (in my case volume 3) with a RAW file system. However, it would be more correct to say that this is a volume without a file system.

Next, you need to format the partition to the NTFS file system. Enter the command format fs=ntfs quick(Where quick– this is an indication that the quick formatting method should be used) and press Enter.

You have just successfully created and formatted a partition. The last thing to do is assign a drive letter to the new partition. This is also a fairly simple task.

Enter the command list volume, note the number of the new partition and enter the command select volume, not forgetting to indicate the section number. For example, in my case the command would look like this: select volume 3 .

Now you have two options to assign a drive letter: you can simply enter the command assign, but then the DiskPart tool will automatically assign one of the available letters to the new partition (this is what is shown in the screenshot below); or you can enter the command assign letter=f, Where f is the drive letter. If you choose the second option, make sure that the letter you want to assign is not already assigned to another drive.

That's all! Everything written above works in Vista, Windows 7 and 8.x.

contemplator

During my youth, it was almost the most used function - disks of 7 - 20 GB could not contain all the necessary information. And that’s exactly what compression is for: to free up space on your hard drive. When you compress a file or folder, the data is overwritten using a special Windows algorithm and occupies fewer clusters after the operation. When you access the file in the next session, the system reverses the process before you can see even a bit of the information you need. And this, as you understand, requires time and system resources.

File compression has been a feature of Windows since the advent of Windows. disk cleanup utilities. But since the time of Windows 7, it has migrated into a separate stream: the developers felt that there were fewer problems with the lack of computer space, and compressing a huge number of files greatly slows down the functionality of Windows: when this function was activated, the system compressed all files in a row, which means that there could also be vital parameters that are accessed momentarily during the current session... Nowadays, freeing up space is easy with the help of other utilities that work in a different direction, and/or by running . In the end, any archiver program can do much more than the function described. However, she is there, let’s get to know her.

By the way

The function and approach to compression in Windows 10 has seriously changed and, it seems (for now, at least) for a much better reason. But about this in a separate article.

A couple of paragraphs of theory...

The NTFS file system uses the “ compression unit” in order to determine the degree of partitioning, granularity of the byte range stream, as well as their alignment or grouping into blocks. The size of this very unit depends only on the size of the cluster in the NTFS system. Until the last moment, the following table was used to calculate the cluster size:

As you can see, from a certain point exceptions begin: “native” NTFS compression stops working on volumes and partitions whose cluster size is selected to be more than 4 KB. For sizes from 8 KB compression begins to be used for sparse files. Such files are another strong point of the NTFS file system, which allows applications to create very large files, which, strange as it may sound, can exceed the size of the parent directory. This happens because the lion's share of the contents of such files (and sometimes completely) is filled with zeros or zero chains. However, the file system does not provide logical clusters for such chains. And NTFS creates only a “pointer to where the virtual number of clusters is filled.” What does compression have to do with it? NTFS, when working to compress a file or folder, divides the data stream using the same principle. Moreover, the compression process is individual for each file; the degree of compression and subsequent operations with the file are very dependent on its actual size.

Compressing files and folders

The function is available from the context menu by right-clicking on the desired file/folder. She is here:

We activate the function, compression has begun. After this, you can force Windows to highlight compressed files. This is easy to do with a whole disk. We will find in Windows Explorer list of volumes and also call the context menu with the right mouse:

Compress disks and files. What do you need to know?

• Compression is available ONLY for the NTFS file system
• If a file is moved from ordinary folders in compressed folder of ANOTHER DISK, it also undergoes a compression procedure
• If a file is moved from ordinary folders in compressed folder on the SAME DISK, compression is canceled and the file/folder returns to its original size
• Files compressed using NTFS compression cannot be encrypted: duplication of procedures in any form is excluded in Windows, and therefore...
• You won't be able to compress an already compressed file either)))
• Do not confuse with archiving (in zip, rar, etc.)

Compression. What not to do.

As you may have already realized, Windows compression is not a feature you should mess around with. However, understanding the compression function (at least within the paragraphs at the top of the article) can help you determine the root of the errors that appear. The most typical of them, and this may be the fault compression functions:

• There is not enough disk space. This error may occur to you precisely at the moment of copying a file/folder or at the stage of creating a backup copy.
• Error copying large files to a compressed folder
• Compressed VHD files reduce virtual machine performance

Do not compress the disk with the operating system installed on it! System disk WITH: You cannot undergo this procedure. Most often, device drivers suffer from this, refusing to start a whole set of devices that just seemed to be working. After the compression procedure is completed, the operating system will most likely not boot in the new session. But if - I don’t know what made you - you decide to do it, do not touch at least root directories.

After compression the system does not boot...

If I’m late with my advice, and you’ve already encountered a failure to start the system after compression, know that those few, but extremely important files for booting the system, were compressed. And during system startup, the “de-compression” procedure is not provided. As a result: the system does not start or Windows is constantly restarting. And you will have to work hard.

In such cases, I always use a universal option - this is an external box with a hard drive installed inside, on which a whole bunch of images of Windows boot disks of any model and bit capacity are always ready: from Windows XP to Win10 32 and 64. And I don’t worry about countless disks and flash drives.

Set the BIOS to boot from the drive with the Windows disk inside:

select the language and in the installation window select System Restore: