bit finagling

So I decided to finally try to get Linux on my “Primary” computer. I have different flavors of linux installed on a number of computers, none of which I really use… So I figured I’d give it a shot on the computer I usually use, which I generally dislike but may like better with some Cinnamon Mint..

A bit trickier than other install because this guy is a Windows 10 2-in-1 with only a 110gb SSD, one that is encrypted with Bitlocker. And I’d rather not give issues to my existing Windows install

I had about 3 gb free on the drive, so I just deleted some stuff that wasn’t needed (mainly family pictures and music files that live on multiple other volumes aside from this one). That gave me close to 20gb free so I figured I’d try to shrink the partition using Disk Management.

Hmmm… Shrink partition was only willing to give me 137 megs. So I checked the defrag log and it reported that the last unmovable file was the pagefil. So I turned off paging and restarted (don’t worry, I plan to turn it back on once I’m done).

Now I had 11gb available (out of 34 gb free). The last unmovable file this time was hiberfil, so I’m going to turn that off.

But I also noticed in Treesize that there was a 9.8 GB CRC folder on the computer. Ugh, I’ve been stuck with these things before… Thinking about it, last year I think I logged into this computer at work with my domain account and so my domain profile is still hiding on here, even though I’d long ago removed the user. Of course, it won’t let me delete them, so I’ll take ownership and dump them. I followed a couple of the brief steps at TechNet. This was for offline files, which I didn’t have on, but I figured it would work for this as well. So I did the takeown and icacals lines, and it went pretty smoothly and the C drive reports 44GB free. Now with 44gb free, I’m going to turn off hibernation with the powercfg -h off command to get rid of that pesky file… Done! That brought me to 45.6 free. Now I’ll try shrink volume again…

w00t! 46682mb available. Much better. Now let’s try to actually Shrink it and hope I don’t wreck the windows part. Attempting to shrink it by 24000mb…

Ugh. Even after a reboot it comes back with “There is not enough space available on the disk to complete this operation”. Well, it’s late. I’ll pick back up with this project tomorrow.

– Tomorrow…

I couldn’t talk it into using that space so I ended up turning off Bitlocker. It failed again with the same message, however, a different log entry… “Error: during shrink initiated on volume OS we failed to move a moveable file extent.”. That’s the first time that there has been a log entry implying that it actually started the shrinking process, so that’s progress… Probably due to turning off bitlocker, I would guess.

The file in question this time is a photo in the google drive folder. So I disconnected from Google Backup and Sync and deleted the sync folder. I know, it probably sounds like i’m getting a bit carried away with hack n slash on this drive…

Removing the Drive folder brought me up to 50233mb free. I tried to shrink it by 24000mb again and it failed. So this time, I tried a 7000mb shrink… And it worked! So I did another, and then an 8000mb shrink and they all worked. So now I finally have my 22000mb space… I know it doesn’t sound like much, but most of what I actually use doesn’t take much space.

I rebooted to my usb (which had Mint 18 Cinnamon on it) and did the install, picking the “install alongside Windows 10” option.

It did it just fine and everything seems hunky dory. I can boot and pick between them and both seem to work fine (including touchpad and touchscreen!). I haven’t checked sound as I don’t use sound on my computers anyway… Now to install some standards (keepassx, something to work with truecrypt, thunderbird, see if I can get some kind of Netextender solution…).

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