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From: Szakacsits S. <sz...@si...> - 2003-04-14 10:37:54
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On Mon, 14 Apr 2003, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
> This is completely not true. NTFS doesn't care how big the partition is
> (except for the backup boot sector which can be just left out to be
> replaced by chkdsk). The volume can be much smaller than the partition and
> it all works just fine.
True. As I've wrote already on Linux-NTFS-Dev the minimum partition
size needed is
<number_of_clusters> * <cluster_size> + 512 bytes.
If [system] partition is smaller than this then Windows will just reboot
during boot without any message. Several people reported this to me who
shrunk the partition in the middle of NTFS after ntfsresize. When they
fixed (properly enlarged) the partition size eveything started to work
fine again.
This is also the reasons I can recommend people to do NTFS shrinking at
present as
ntfsresize (Linux)
defrag (Windows)
ntfsresize (Linux)
fdisk (Linux)
chkdsk (Windows)
because the built-in Windows defragmenter doesn't move file data towards
the beginning of the partition, it just defragments and actually sometimes
it even moves data towards the end of the partition.
> An additional complexity is that your imaging program _has_ to cope both
> with volumes where the backup bootsector is at the end of the partition
> and with volumes where it is in the middle of the volume. - Yes these do
> exist (with NT4-pre-SP4 and NT3).
I'm not sure I've seen this between NT4 and NT4-pre-SP4 but I believe NT3.
I also think this case (backup bootsector in the middle of volume) could be
just unsupported, NTFS version <= 1.1? I don't think it's worth bothering
with this case since statistically nobody uses them.
Szaka
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