1 Topic by cacu (edited by cacu 2021-02-17 02:38:35)

  • cacu
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Topic: 30 GB missing after resizing and relocating partitions

Hi there,

I have a notebook HP 250 with a dual boot HDD with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04 (GParted 0.30.0). My intention was to expand the Ubuntu partition and its swap partition at the expense of deleting the HP recovery partition and shrinking the windows partition and another partition where I only store files. I will show my initial disk layout and sum up the actions taken:

sd1 EFI
sd2 Microsoft reserved
sd3 Ubuntu
sd4 Windows
sd5 store (files)
sd6 Windows recovery
sd7 HP recovery partition

1. Deleted sd7 (~13GB) from CMD as HP support advised. The space become unallocated.
2. With a bootable USB with Ubuntu 20 and Gparted I resized and relocated the partitions
3. The job failed at some point, after around two hours. Seems like the computer rebooted automatically as GParted GUI was gone. I reopened GParted and didn't see any errors from the partitions, seemed like the only change was that the old space of sd7 was merged with sd5
5. Rerun Gparted again and something similar happened after ~1 hour. The computer rebooted automatically and I saw sd6 had shrunk as expected as well as sd4 expanded but the figures for used space and free space remain the same. That's why I say the space is missing, despite the partition expanded is not usable.
6. Tried to shrink sd4 from Windows but I can't even shrink it by 1 MB. I was prompted to run the chckdsk and I went ahead, from CMD the chckdsk run with next reboot and completed without showing any errors (not sure if I should check that proactively if there's a log I should check). Then I run the windows disk cleaner and defragmented the partition but same thing.

Any ideas on how I can make those 30GB available? Or recommendations in general?

Please ask if you need any clarifications and thanks in advance

2 Reply by class413

  • class413
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Re: 30 GB missing after resizing and relocating partitions

After any ntfs resizing, you have to reboot windows twice, and run chkdsk from within windows (mormally. chkdsk runs automatically  at boot time if the windows boot loader finds that the partition is "dirty").
Sometimes, after a resizing problem the partition size is modified in the partition table but the filesystem doesn't show any change. You can run the "check" operation from GParted for these partitions. This often fixes the filesystem issue.
I would suggest to proceed by making changes to one partition only at the time and check everything from the OS's, to be able to locate the source of the problem.

*** It is highly recommended to backup any important files before doing resize/move operations. ***

3 Reply by cacu (edited by cacu 2021-02-24 04:28:53)

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Re: 30 GB missing after resizing and relocating partitions

class413 wrote:

After any ntfs resizing, you have to reboot windows twice, and run chkdsk from within windows (mormally. chkdsk runs automatically  at boot time if the windows boot loader finds that the partition is "dirty").
Sometimes, after a resizing problem the partition size is modified in the partition table but the filesystem doesn't show any change. You can run the "check" operation from GParted for these partitions. This often fixes the filesystem issue.
I would suggest to proceed by making changes to one partition only at the time and check everything from the OS's, to be able to locate the source of the problem.

yes, you are right, I checked the partition with Gparted and it was solved. I was not sure if checking a windows partition with a linux tool would be a good idea but I just experienced it is following your advice. Thanks very much.

But then I accidentally messed it up, I decided to continue moving and re-sizing partitions but one hour after GParted started running I had the great idea of inserting the battery into my laptop in case there's a power outage. So I put the lid of my laptop down so that I could insert the battery but I only provoked the system to sleep and made a mess. I was really careful to not close the lid, leaving like a 5 cm gap but it was not enough. Maybe I should open a new thread for this, I'll sum it up here and just confirm if a new thread would be necessary.

It happened while the windows partition was being worked, my computer restarted when I opened the lid and then I got a BSOD if trying to boot with windows. I have run the windows chckdsk but same, have also run the check from GParted but no luck. The GParted logs show SUCCESS for all steps but ntfsresize shows a lot of entries like this:

Incomplete multi-sector transfer: magic: 0x005f0000 size: 1024 usa_ofs: 0 usa_count: 2 data: 259 usn: 0: Input/output error

and around 4 entries showing corruption like this:

Record 201781 has corrupt allocation size (1024 <> 1818838650)


So at this point, when I attempt to access windows I get the Srttrail.txt BSOD error or winload.efi error depending on what I'm trying to do. I'll keep trying to fix it with bootrec and so but if I can't, I suppose I'll turn to the image I took of my whole disk with Clonezilla. This should restore the disk to the point it was at when I took the image right?

Cheers,

Carlos