windows volume Shrink question

[mokkan]

Hello,

We have 400GB space on our dive and only  110 is used and we need to shrink our volume to 200 GB.  I looked at the Windows document and looks like straight forward through VEA to shrink the volume. When we do it in unix/linux we need to resize the FS , before we reduce the volume, but in Windows they are doing without reducing the FS. How are they doing it in Windows without reducing the FS.

Thanks in advance

[Gaurav_S · Accepted solution]

Shrink volume would take care of filesystem reduction as well .. From below link it reads like shrink volume can work with both Raw & NTFS volumes

If its a raw volume, it would have only volume shrink ..

Read couple of sections from here

https://sort.veritas.com/public/documents/vie/7.0/windows/productguides/html/sfw_admin/VmShrinkVolumeDialog.htm

G

[RiaanBadenhorst]

You might be able to shrink the volume from 400 to 200, if you're lucky. From what I was told once is that NTFS goes and writes "stuff" halfway down the volume so you can never shrink it by more than 50%. 

Good luck.

[Wally_Heim]

Hi Mokkan,

With SFW 6.0 and higher, we are taking advantage of OS functions to shrink the volume and NTFS at the same time. This allows us to shrink volume to almost the same size as the data size on the volume. 

I would recommend that you have a backup before doing the shrink operation and it is a good idea to have the latest CP for the version that you are using.

Before SFW 6.0, we used an internally developed utility to shrink the volume and we made calls to the OS to shrink NTFS.  With these versions we were limited on the shrink operations to about 50% of the orginial size of the volume, as Mike mentioned.

Thank you,

Wally