Windows Cannot cannot shrink a

volume beyond the point where any

unmovable files are located
Posted on October 25, 2016

I finally received my new Dell Inspiron 15 Serie 5000 with a 1TB hard disk!

Target

I would like (maybe very shortly) to move the system and applications to a new SSD
drive (perhaps 120GB or 240GB size). So, given that the C: (system) partition has only
30 GB used (~896 GB of total size), one of the first configurations I wanted to do with
my new laptop was shrinking this partition to 120 GB.

Problem / Error

The problem was that, after performing the shrinking, I could reduce the size only to
~460GB (not enough for my purposes).

Maybe after running a defragmentation process I could try to shrink. So i ran the
process and when trying to reduce the size again, it still didnt allow a single MB
more
..and still showing the message You cannot shrink a volume 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

Analysis

Now that the partition is defragmented, the unmovable files could be any of the
following (probably located in C:):

Hibernation hibernate.sys
Pagefile pagefile.sys
System protection System Volume Information folder
The defrag events showed the following:

So, the problem (at least one of them) seems to be a file in System Volume
Information.

Solution

Temporary i had to disable the System protection configured against C:

Anyway, the hibernation and pagefile could afterwards lead to the same error, so I
decided to disable all of them:

1. DI S A B LE HI B E R NA T I O N

C:\> powercfg /h off

2. DI S A B LE P A G E F I L E

C:\> SystemPropertiesPerformance.exe
3. DI S A B LE S Y S T E M P R O T E C T I O N

C:\> SystemPropertiesProtection.exe

3. RE S T A R T A N D S H R I NK

After restarting the system, the changes were applied.

I could then shrink to the size I wanted!
It is critical to reenable the features after the resizing is made (the following steps)

4. E NA B L E HI B E RNA T I O N

C:\> powercfg /h on

5. E NA B L E P A G E F I LE

C:\> SystemPropertiesPerformance.exe
6. E NA B L E S Y S T E M P RO T E C T I O N

C:\> SystemPropertiesAdvanced.exe
Problem solved

3rd party tools are able to manage these unmovable files but if you want to avoid
using one of those solutions, simply by disabling temporary these features the
shrinking you want could be possible.

Now Im ready to migrate my 120GB system partition to a SSD drive when needed
This entry was posted in Windows and tagged partition, ssd, windows by Sysadmin
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