Wow, that's really freakin cool.

[Shawn]

It let me resize my music partition without restarting the computer and I could still access the data on the partition while it was in the process of resizing. I was playing music off the partition the whole time. 😎

BTW mods, this is an off topic thread. Not asking for help. 😛

--------
Moved from OT because thread turned into a Vista discussion Thread.

AnandTech Moderator Evadman - Question about this mod edit? PM AnandTech Moderator and see The Rules

 

[PokerGuy]

I'll move this thread to the right group for you.

Errrrr... I must have forgotten to log into my special mod account 😉

With regard to Vista, I've always wondered why changing the size of the partition had to be something so difficult and risky.....

 

[KLin]

It'd be funny to see this thread moved just because you mentioned it. :laugh:

 

[Regs]

*taps someones shoulder*

 

[Shawn]

Originally posted by: KLin
It'd be funny to see this thread moved just because you mentioned it. :laugh:

Well usually words like Vista or partition sets off the mods radar and they lock or move threads without even reading them. 😛

 

[randomlinh]

I hope you actually had a backup.. cause I would have laughed if your playing while it resized corrupted everything 😛 Nice to hear vista actually has something useful that works. Still waiting for our university to get the licenses to play with it more... altho, none of our systems can really handle the visual eye candy.

 

[FallenHero]

I'm thinking of upgrading very soon myself. How is the upgrade from XP to vista? I know a clean install is recommended, but im lazy.

EDIT. MEOW MEOW MEOW MEOW

 

[Evadman]

Originally posted by: FallenHero
I'm thinking of upgrading very soon myself. How is the upgrade from XP to vista? I know a clean install is recommended, but im lazy.

That would make me need to move the thread. Don't make me do that. I would never hear the end of it. 😉

By the way: I have Vista, and the performance sucks and has tons of real life issues. See the operating systems forum.

 

[nakedfrog]

Not that I can see myself running into that situation, but it's good to know that they did actually put some work into useful features.

 

[kalster]

yaaay, windows can finally do something that linux has been able to do for years,

 

[cougar78]

I can say from using it exclusively for about a month. I'm so not impressed, I find so much more bad then their few improvements. Any system that won't let me play starcraft must burn in hell 🙂

 

[TallBill]

Originally posted by: cougar78
I can say from using it exclusively for about a month. I'm so not impressed, I find so much more bad then their few improvements. Any system that won't let me play starcraft must burn in hell 🙂

Have you tried compatability mode?

 

[ultimatebob]

Heh... I guess that the guy at PowerQuest who was in charge of bribing Microsoft to leave out a partition resizing feature got canned when they got bought out by Symantec 🙂

Oh, and the driver support for Vista still sucks! Almost every device more than 18 months old doesn't have drivers with a full feature set on it. After upgrading, my HP printer, Canon PowerShot, and ATI AllInWonder card are all unsupported and generic drivers don't support a ton of features 🙁

 

[Deadtrees]

Originally posted by: cougar78
I can say from using it exclusively for about a month. I'm so not impressed, I find so much more bad then their few improvements. Any system that won't let me play starcraft must burn in hell 🙂

In my case, SC works just fine. How does it not work?

 

[Shawn]

Originally posted by: Deadtrees

Originally posted by: cougar78
I can say from using it exclusively for about a month. I'm so not impressed, I find so much more bad then their few improvements. Any system that won't let me play starcraft must burn in hell 🙂

In my case, SC works just fine. How does it not work?

PEBKAC 😛

 

[Nothinman]

With regard to Vista, I've always wondered why changing the size of the partition had to be something so difficult and risky.....

Because it is, if you understood how filesystems were laid out on disk and what's required to successfully change the size of one you'd know why it took MS this long to include one in the OS. Actually depending on the filesytem growing isn't too difficult, but shrinking is a completely different story. XFS on Linux still doesn't support shrinking a filesystem even though it does online growing.

 

[Markbnj]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

With regard to Vista, I've always wondered why changing the size of the partition had to be something so difficult and risky.....

Because it is, if you understood how filesystems were laid out on disk and what's required to successfully change the size of one you'd know why it took MS this long to include one in the OS. Actually depending on the filesytem growing isn't too difficult, but shrinking is a completely different story. XFS on Linux still doesn't support shrinking a filesystem even though it does online growing.

I don't know XFS, but if files can be anywhere on disk, and fragmented, that's pretty much a O(n) search problem. You have to virtually defragment and pack everything together before you know your minimum size.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't know XFS, but if files can be anywhere on disk, and fragmented, that's pretty much a O(n) search problem. You have to virtually defragment and pack everything together before you know your minimum size.

Well you don't have to defragment anything, you just have to figure out where the cutoff is and move any fragments beyond there back and update whatever points to that fragment. But that is one reason why most people recommend defragging before doing a shrink because it gives the resizer less work to do. And that's only part of it, XFS uses allocation groups which are also spread across the entire filesystem as creation time so not only do you have to move the data around but you also have to move the metadata to new AGs. And I'm sure there's other stuff that I haven't thought of because I don't really know how the filesystem works internally.

 

[Markbnj]

Well you don't have to defragment anything, you just have to figure out where the cutoff is and move any fragments beyond there back and update whatever points to that fragment.

I guess that's more or less what I meant by "virtually defragment." Don't you have to know how much space is required with all the fragments packed in order to know what the cutoff point is? So you essentially have to do the defragmentation algorithm without writing any of the changes.

 

[Nothinman]

I guess that's more or less what I meant by "virtually defragment." Don't you have to know how much space is required with all the fragments packed in order to know what the cutoff point is? So you essentially have to do the defragmentation algorithm without writing any of the changes.

No, the cutoff I meant was the one set by how small you're trying to make the filesystem. If you're shrinking from 40G to 20G you have to move all of the data to before the 20G cutoff. It would be easy to tell if it'll fit since you already know how much data is in the filesystem and if it supports some form of packing to make the data smaller then you have even more room to work with so it's not a concern anyway.

 

[Markbnj]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

I guess that's more or less what I meant by "virtually defragment." Don't you have to know how much space is required with all the fragments packed in order to know what the cutoff point is? So you essentially have to do the defragmentation algorithm without writing any of the changes.

No, the cutoff I meant was the one set by how small you're trying to make the filesystem. If you're shrinking from 40G to 20G you have to move all of the data to before the 20G cutoff. It would be easy to tell if it'll fit since you already know how much data is in the filesystem and if it supports some form of packing to make the data smaller then you have even more room to work with so it's not a concern anyway.

Right, but I was thinking that even though you know the size of the files in the filesystem, you don't know exactly how many clusters you'll need to occupy when the disk is rearranged. I'm well off the reservation in terms of my experience at this point 🙂.

 

[Nothinman]

Right, but I was thinking that even though you know the size of the files in the filesystem, you don't know exactly how many clusters you'll need to occupy when the disk is rearranged. I'm well off the reservation in terms of my experience at this point

Well all you're doing is moving data from the end of the filesystem up so I don't think there would be any problem with saying "I have X free and need to move Y amount of data, is X<Y?" and go from there. But I'm sure I haven't accounted for all of the corner cases though. =)