westid

just don’t do it!

so this weekend was pretty eventful, but only for me. there are those of you may have already forgotten most of it. in vast numbers too, i surmise

still not dead [sorry, cunts :*]

anyway, whatever you did, don’t do it. especially if it’s a very large partition … now, you may be wondering why, but just hear me out …

when you have a massive as fuck hard drive, and you want to shrink the partition… erm… like when JJ goes to the doctor:- just don’t do that, the doctor might be right. everyone has this brilliant sort-of bragging, most-likely irritating, and definitely pointless and sad to even bring up, brand of ‘solution’ [just don’t do it in the first place] … nice one dick head, when i’ve got the time machine sorted, i’ll fucking keep that in mind -_- you just have to get used to it, in a number of ways that sensitive advice can pop up at any time in your life, unsuspecting, usually unreal, always shit

the only application i could find i’m not going to advertise but let’s just say it’s only the genius that can do the disk [i never endorse a commercial venture] when it comes to shrinking exFAT partitions. i know what else you might be thinking too, as i would have thought in your shoes at the time and probably did, there is an application that can resize this shit, so i don’t need to conform with the norm and when i’ve finished working on it then it will last forever. sorry to burst your bubble, but you might be in for a bit of a shock. and solid state d’s are just as susceptible to eventual failure as the ones with the spinning thingy inside are

so what’s with the hate? alright, i’ll stop holdin out on you… get your laffin tackle around this:

now, you might be wondering what it is that you’re lookin’ at. sadly, only the victims of exfat partitions can give you the answer. oh yeah … trigger warning [exFAT partition context menu in windows disk manager]

so – you learn from the wisdom of others yeah? don’t make an internal exfat partition! or one day you will come to know, or your loved ones; or yours, or yours, or YOURS ! reefer madness music starts playing

when you make an exfat partition, you’re basically saying “my file system is for storage purposes only and will never have a partition which needs to be resized or split” … sounds quite basic and obvious, right? wrong =[

if you still can’t understand, then allow me. with the rise in smart phones, the internet of things, software as a service and all the other twatty names you can think of, everyone in the whole wide world has an hard disk either about their person, or in their possession, whether they like computers or not. metal gear solid showed us a glimpse beyond any overn-ment official secrets rules by coining the term, that is only just now coming out for normal people now, in 1998: personal area network, and more broadly the internet of things

the point that i was going to try and make was that in theory, hard disk drives [including solid state hard disk drives] are solely for storage, but that theory cannot exist in the earth’s atmosphere, let alone the inside of your computer. this doesn’t depend on how good [not quantifiable] you are at computers, it’s more about how you use them, and what you use them for

cards on the table: when you install something, or save ongoing work, or have a shortcut, or any amount of other things, it ties another string between your system disk [usually C:\] and the other disk drive. it’s this usage of the drive in the practical world, as software comes to support loading and storing things on a different disk than the one you boot from, that eventually creates a large number of strings [and other things] that will just break the hell out of your shit. just ask yourself right now, ask yourself and answer this honestly… if you have an internal drive with an exfat partition, and you pulled that drive out of the motherboard, would your computer still work exactly the same as it does now, without it?

if the answer to this is any more uncertain than a definite yes, then you need to ditch the exfat and just save it for external storage drives [anything that isn’t permanently plugged into your machine] and here’s how i had to do it …

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note: before trying any of this stuff, disable any applications that start up from this other drive, save any files you are currently editing, and do a full and safe restart of your computer. you’re going to basically empty the drive, and software opening while you’re in the middle of something doing something like this will cause all kinds of problems. best to switch when nothing from that drive is running, and let sleeping dogs lie. just make sure that your exfat partition has the same drive letter when you bring it back online

i am not liable for any damages as a result of you trying / failing to do these things. this is just what i did

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if you’re looking around the internet for ways to resize an exfat partition, you’re probably wasting your time. what you should do is this: get an external drive or drive(s) or computer(s) with enough space to put every little bit of your largest exfat partition onto [so the partition is completely empty] and plug it in. a while ago i did not know this, but all week it’s been bugging me [not just every computer that i touch] – so i finally bothered to do something about it, after all this time – and then right-click the start menu button and choose windows powershell [home users may or may not have this, i don’t know] or preferrably, windows powershell (admin) and this command: pushd “D:\” where D is the drive letter of your massive exfat partition you unwittingly set up probably when you got the thing a long time ago. you do not need quotation marks with the pushd command unless the path name you give it contains any spaces

for demonstration purposes only, i am going to demonstrate with my frasier box-set. so pretend my source path to frasier is D:

pro-tip: if you don’t want to keep typing really really long path and file names, type the first few letters until you couldn’t be in the middle of typing anything else, and then press tab. the shell will fill the rest of it in for you [e.g. type: fra<tab> and windows powershell even fills in the escape characters to account for any spaces, without typing it all in all the time

the A drive is the exfat partition [or the other way round depending on your situation] but if we just wipe it and start again we will lose frasier!

right, the hard bit’s over. now you need to plug in your external drive [or free up space on another internal drive, or removable media] but the file structure needs to be exactly the same as it was before or it may have all been for nothing. but you disabled and closed any apps and restarted your computer, right? so that’s not going to bother us until you enable those same things again, thusly … it’s all good

now, before we carry on the command line we need to have our backup frasier drive ready

this is one that i made earlier. our destination path will be S:\frasier-backup [or the other way round, as long as you have access to it, then it should be alright]

now it’s almost time to do the copy. before you start wondering why don’t i just drag and drop the files for? i forgive you, because for most people that’s an easy mistake to make. but no, we’re not just copying here, we’re moving. moving means that the computer copies something and then deletes the original when the copy is done. it means everything you think that it does [‘cut’] is usually what it’s called instead of copy. and it makes use of what i reckon is one of the best things mike row soft has ever come up with: robocopy

Now we have our Frasier source and our backup Frasier folder on another hard disk, it’s time. Make sure you have full access permissions in each drive and that the computer is not going to power off or fall asleep while this command operates. [for really big hard disk capacity, this could easily happen]

escape characters: just a quick note, and this applies to any text editing or command line situation .. you should either use delimiters [like the ‘ ‘ around the path with spaces in it] or escape characters [that tell the computer this isn’t the end of the command just yet, and to take that into consideration. here is a correct example that i made earlier

when you’ve got all of it together in the right syntax like this example above, and left the /switches just the same as the one in the screenshot, fire away …

because i’ve already done this, let’s see how our frasier box set is getting on! depending on how big the amount of stored shit that you need to move, this could take a while. what i took from the experience was an opportunity to go for a piss and make a cup of tea

always bear in mind that robocopy can be stopped at any time, by pressing ctrl+c
and it takes care of any partial files instantly

if you want to put everything back, press the up arrow to bring up the last command [or last few commands] that you made, and then just swap the source and destination directory around it will go completely back to normal. we’re going to be using this other-way-round command after everything is finished, so even if you learn now or learn later, it’s all good. you’re reight. and when someone from round here says reight then, you know it’s either on, or it’s goin’ off. both really good things so it’s win-win if you’re going to look at it that way around

choosing the file system! yep, this is what’s going to pickle your mind. now you’ve got the partition you need to change completely empty [or it should be completely empty before you move forward] – by this point, if you’re lookin at it step by step is … robocopy should have finished moving frasier from the exfat partition completely by now, or you should wait for it to finish and then look back at it now

frasier might be the world record holder for the most successful / prolific spin-off series, ever … but they only did 11 series’ worth. it’s completely normal for this to be taking a long time so don’t worry about it. now when you’re ready to pick a file system you need to concentrate, and put everything back the way it was before you let anything that is installed on your computer find out that any of it has moved at all

now choosing the file system is very dependent upon what you’re going to use it for. do you need it to work with every operating system? will anything crash without the files you’re moving? the most important thing is that it is supported by windows 10 pro [or whatever version of windows that you’re on] – that hands down has got to be NTFS. not only has microsoft invented this 23 years ago [so you can be sure that it has already stood the test of time, that’s very important yknow … when you are choosing anything in this life], it is also supported by most distributions of linux, and with NTFS you have much more capability there. there are other file systems out there, but it depends on what you’re going to be doing. if you were solely a linux user, i would probably pick the ext4 or whatever the latest filesystem is going down in the ubuntu world right now … but then you would have no say at all when that is incompatible with windows … so it works both ways

don’t succumb to choice paralysis .. just bear in mind that at least you won’t have a massive exfat partition when push comes to shove, and i’m rooting for ya out there. you know, there’s no way to break that news without the tragic impact of exfat abuse. millions of people are finding out that their exfat partition is too big to fail, every single day of our lives. just make sure the exfat doesn’t fuck with YOU!

xoxoxk – westid

edit: retroactive justification of text