Between Linux and Anime

Kind of like Schrodinger's Cat

Category: Microsoft

Resizing/Shrinking a Windows NTFS Partition past the “Immovable System Files”

This cost me a whole evening, especially nowadays when some manufacturers don’t actually ship a Windows CD with their hardware anymore – so you can’t even just thrash Windows and reinstall on a smaller partition. Just so much effort to beat Windows into letting me install Linux alongside it in a manner that I want. It’s deliberate I tell you. Geez.

So the Windows default disk management tool that is the standard (and, presumably, safest) way to shrink a Windows NTFS volume is basically shit, unless you’re satisfied with only freeing a very modest amount of your volume’s free space. I always knew that. What continues to surprise me is how difficult it can seem to work around this inadequacy (a glaring one, I might add, that has been around since Vista). People have created utilities to find the “immovable” system files that are blocking the shrinking and proceeded to remove them one by one by guesswork. Free Software partitioning swiss-army-knife extraordinaire GParted can also be used to shrink the partition, but this borks the installed Windows system in the process, requiring a Windows CD to fix in a separate, tedious procedure.

As it turns out though, there is a program, freeware for personal use (not, unfortunately, free software), that.. just does the job for you. The program is MiniTool Partition Wizard, and it’s inexplicably pretty hidden on Google when I was searching, not even being mentioned in this otherwise informative and comprehensive article on the subject.

This thing works, I tried – I managed to shrink my volume by 200GB or so more than the default Windows tool would let me. There is another surprise though: you’d think you’ll need the “bootable CD” version to get this done since you can’t have windows mounted and running while the process takes place. Don’t waste your time – I spent a good chunk of time trying to hack the thing onto a flash drive (not having nor willing to sacrifice a blank CD), only to find out that the bootable image runs off some super-ancient version of Fedora Core (Surprise surprise, Linux!) that just wouldn’t boot on my modern hardware.

Just get the Home Edition: it will actually prompt you to reboot your box, and will proceed to complete the shrinking before letting Windows start. I wished this was clearer on the website.

Oh, of course, the standard precaution applies: back up anything important before doing this. Apparently complaints do exist that the tool wrecked their drive. Still, a solution that works most of the time is better than no solution.

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Madobe Nanami, Jim Raynor, and Negima

In other words, “Random Post on Decidedly Unrelated Things”. Basically when I haven’t blogged in a long while I end up with a little growing pile of things-I-could-blog up somewhere in my brain, and at some point I get the lazy-man’s urge to just make a simple brain-dump post and write a summary of the entire pile and call it a day.

I have only partly succumbed to temptation here. Some stalwart part of me has successfully convinced the whole to hold back on talking about the current season’s anime offerings in inevitable haphazard fashion and instead save them for, hopefully, full posts. So let’s cross our fingers and hope for an eventual post each for OreImo, IkaMusume, and To Love Ru (yes, you can tell the state of my brain over the past semester from the anime I picked) – when I finish getting my new computer set up.

Yes. I got a new computer. Let me show you my desktop.

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The Web, the Desktop, and the Google between

I haven’t written a proper tech article since before I (re-)started this blog, so I thought it was high time. Besides, I’ve been wanting to write this post ever since I read some articles on Google’s Chrome OS, around the time right after my old blog vaporized. So there’s a couple of buzzwords to hopefully sucker you into clicking the ‘more’ button and actually reading the article – It’s about Google’s upcoming Chrome OS and it’s implications for the web, the desktop and the browser, as well as why desktop evolution can take an alternative path, exemplified by KDE’s budding Project Silk movement.

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Nanami Madobe? How about Rina Kusuda?

I guess, given the resonance of the news with the geek-otaku underpinnings of this blog, it’s high time I finally came out and said something about this chick:

Tsundere remark: W.. we have multi-touch support in KDE SC 4.4 too. J-Just so you know!

(Warning: this post may contain an unhealthy dose of nonsense)

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ODF and Windows 7

Wow, I didn’t plan on posting until I did a proper ‘opening ceremony’ post but this one is too interesting to escape mention:

Do you see what I see?

Native, out-the-box ODF support? In MY Microsoft software? You bet! A quick, deserved salute here to Microsoft. One small step for a company, one giant leap forward for document format interoperability.

People on Windows 7 will be getting ODT’s from me from now on >=)

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