So, you’ve recently purchased a new SSD and want to migrate your Windows 7 system drive over to it so you can enjoy some super fast computing action without the need to reinstall Windows and all of your favourite apps and games? Well, it’s all cake and bikkies if your source partition is already smaller than the destination drive, if not, you may be in for some heady times my friend.
If your partition requires shrinking, especially if your current drive is at least twice the size of the destination drive, then you’ll likely encounter the fun fact that Windows has a whole bunch of unmovable files that prevent you from shrinking the partition beyond about 50% of its current size, but it can be done.
- You’ll need to run Computer Management. In Windows Explorer right click on Computer and choose Manage (you’ll probably get a UAC prompt).
- In the tree on the left hand side click on Disk Management under Storage. Right click on the drive you’d like to shrink, and choose Shrink Volume…
- You’ll see a Querying Disk Space window. Be patient it may take a while. Once the window appears, choose how much you want to shrink the drive by in megabytes (it will default to the maximum amount).
- Click Shrink.
- If you want to shrink your drive further, and you know you have more free space available, there is probably an unmovable file on the drive. Follow the steps under Removing an Unmovable File below.
- Run Computer Management.
- In the tree on the side click on Event Viewer under Computer Management (Local) > System Tools.
- Under Summary of Administrative Events (it may take a few seconds for its contents to appear) expand Information by clicking the [+] icon.
- Scroll down to find 259 in the Event ID column and double click on it.
- Under the General tab there will be a line that says – The last unmovable file appears to be: followed by a path and filename.
- Follow the instructions below for the specific file.
- Try shrinking your drive again. If you still can’t shrink your drive as much as you’d like then go to step 1 and wash, rinse, repeat until your drive is small enough. If you can’t shrink your drive at all then you’ve either done something wrong, or more likely I haven’t provided you with the necessary instructions. If you’re using an antivirus/antispyware program other than Microsoft Security Essentials you may need to uninstall it.
pagefile.sys
Windows 7 - How do I move files to shrink a partition? I want to have a large D drive to put all my media files on and leave C just for system files. At first I could only make the D drive about 450 Gb, by moving the pagefile to D for now I was able to get my C Drive down to about 250 Gb but I'd like to get it down to about 100 Gb if possible. Enter the exact disk space in MB and click Shrink button. Note: you cannot shrink a partition beyond the point where any unmovable files are located. See the 'defrag' event in the Application log for detailed information about the operation when it has completed. See 'Shrink a basic volume' in Disk Management help for more information.
- In Windows Explorer right click on Computer and choose Properties.
- In the left hand pane, click Advanced system settings.
- In the Advanced tab under Performance click Settings…
- In the Advanced tab under Virtual memory click Change…
- Select the drive you want to resize from the list, then select the No paging file radio button.
- If you have another drive available you may want to select it and choose System managed size, as having no paging file at all may cause issues if you’re low on memory.
Windows.edb
Free spiderman friend or foe iso pc download free. This is the database used by Windows indexing service and can easily be moved to another drive.
Windows 7 Shrink Disk Unmovable Files Download
- Open Control Panel then click on System and Security then, under System, click on Check the Windows Experience Index then, on the blue left hand pane, click Adjust indexing options.
- Click the Advanced button.
- In the Index Settings tab under Index location click the Select new button.
- Create a new folder on another drive and give it a sensible name, select your new folder and click OK.
- Click OK, and your indexing files will now be moved to the new folder you created.
MpScanCache-0.bin
This is the cache file for Microsoft Security Essentials.
- Uninstall Microsoft Security Essentials by going to Control Panel and clicking Uninstall a program (listed under Programs).
- Select Microsoft Security Essentials and click the Uninstall button on the toolbar.
- Don’t forget to reinstall MSE after you’ve successfully shrunk your drive.
System Volume Information{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}
This is System Restore data. You’ll need to disable System Restore (aka system protection) on your drive.
- In Windows Explorer right click on Computer and choose Properties.
- In the left hand pane, click System protection.
- In the System Protection tab select your drive, then click the Configure… button.
- Select Turn off system protection.
- Click the Delete button to remove existing restore points from your drive.
- Click OK.
index.dat
This is an Internet Explorer history/cache file.
The Easy Way
- Install CCleaner (which can be found at www.piriform.com/ccleaner)
- Close any web browsers you have running and use CCleaner to clear your internet history, cache etc. Do not run Internet Explorer again otherwise it will recreate some of the files you just removed.
- Try resizing the drive again. If you can’t shrink the drive at all try The Hard Way below.
The Hard Way
- Download the Sysinternals utility called MoveFile which comes packaged with PendMoves (found at technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897556). Unzip the file to the folder of your choice. (This is a command line program that allows you to schedule a file to be moved or deleted the next time you restart your computer.)
- Copy the name of the unmovable file from the Computer Management event information panel without the ::$DATA part at the end. It might look something like ‘UsersUserNameAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsHistoryHistory.IE5index.dat’ although some of the folder names may vary.
- In Windows Explorer find the folder that you unzipped PendMoves.zip to. Hold down shift and right click on the folder, then choose Open command window here.
- Type movefile followed by a space, followed by a double quote. Then paste in the filename by clicking on the icon in the upper left corner of the Command Prompt window and choosing Edit > Paste from the menu. Finish off by typing a double quote followed by a space, followed by two double quotes, then press Enter. Your typed line should look something like this:
movefile “UsersUserNameAppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsHistoryHistory.IE5index.dat” “” - Restart your computer, making sure not to run Internet Explorer before or after you’ve restarted.
![Cannot shrink volume unmovable files Cannot shrink volume unmovable files](https://www.howtogeek.com/thumbcache/60/40/91a283bc99b95689f5a88a33a0e2f886/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Fullscreen_2_28_17__9_49_AM-650x300.png.pagespeed.ce.-RjYU_xftx.png)
Once your current system partition is small enough to fit on the new drive, you can very easily clone it onto the new drive with EASEUS Todo Backup Home (which is free from their website at www.todo-backup.com). You just need to make sure Windows isn’t using the destination drive for anything like system restore/protection, pagefile, indexing etc. This shouldn’t be a problem if it’s a brand spanking new drive.
After cloning the drive you’ll need to either disconnect the old drive, or go into your BIOS setup and change the boot order of the drives. The first couple of times you boot up onto the new drive Windows will probably run chkdsk.
Don’t forget to re-enable virtual memory (pagefile), indexing and system restore if you disabled them, and reinstall your antivirus program if you removed it.
Ntfs Unmovable Files
The reason why Windows won’t let you shrink the volume is because there are immovable system files at the very end of the volume. Do following steps- Run the Disk Cleanup Wizard, making sure to remove the hibernation file and all restore points.
- Disable windows indexing
- Disable the pagefile ( Open up System in Control Panel, then Advanced System Settings Advanced Performance Advanced Change No Paging File.
- In the same Advanced Settings, go to Startup and Recovery Settings and then change the Write debugging information drop-down to “None” to disable the kernel memory dump.
- Disable Hibernation mode in your power options advanced power options screen or by runnuing powercfg -h off
- Reboot the machine, and then delete your c:pagefile.sys file, following below
- takeown /f C:WindowsSystem32en-USwinload.exe.mui
- cacls C:WindowsSystem32en-USwinload.exe.mui /G <username>:F
Now that we’ve deleted almost every system file that we can, you should run at least one of these free defrag utilities, but preferably all of them, in order to move all of the files to the beginning of the volume, so we can force the Shrink volume feature to work.
- Power Defragmenter(GUI interface for sysinternals contig)
If you are encountering the MFT problem, then you won’t have too much luck even after running those utilities. What you’ll need to do is use one of the non-free defrag utilities that is able to move the MFT files. If somebody can suggest a free way to move the MFT, leave a note in the comments.
- You can download a 30-day free trial of Perfect Disk and then uninstall it when you are done. Or not.
At this point you should be able to shrink the partition, at least a decent amount. Once you’ve gotten the partition shrunk, you should re-enable those important files:
- Re-enable the Pagefile (Reverse instructions above)
- If you have issues re-enabling hibernate, follow these steps.
- Enabling System Restore or kernel debugging information is entirely up to you.
- Reboot.