shrinking windows volume to dual boot bazzite
im not sure if this is where i should ask but im trying to see how bazzite is because im thinking of switching my main os which has been windows for as long as i can remember. the problem is that i wnat to dual boot but to do that i have to shrink my volume but i can't because there is a file called $Mft apparently that is "immovable" which prevents windows from allowing me to shrink the volume to its full potential or close to it. does anyone know how to solve this issue? ( i tried contig but it doesnt work apparently)
10 Replies
mft is master file table, it is not a regular file but a "meta" file that holds info about other files. as for moving it, I found this: https://superuser.com/a/1850586/2706635
you can boot to windows recovery, use diskpart from command line to shrink it.
Super User
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Oh. thanks for the help but i found out something along these lines as well. i spoke to someone on the windows discord and they told me i can use GParted Live to shrink and modify the partitions to my liking without any more problems but was warned that it may break stuff. TL:DR i was successfull in making a 400Gb partition where i'll install bazzite and so far nothing broke so im in the green for now lol. thank you for trying to help though
did you shrink windows and it still boots?
yeah i had a 1tb partition where windows, games and everything were and i had 600ish gb free
so i took 400gb out and made a new partition
and yeah it booted perfectly fine as far as i can see
good to know. when using master boot record (something old & unsupported by bazzite) shrinking windows always breaks it afaik, also I witnessed a (very likely) UEFI system break by shrinking windows within linux.
I thought windows always, unconditionally broke when shrinking from linux lol
uefi system break? you mean that bios can just brick itself? lol
no
different boot methods, MBR / BIOS and GPT / UEFI
ooh
on the first one shrinking breaks
MBR / BIOS is very old, you need not be concerned about that
and bazzite doesn't even support it (for boot)
yeah my bad im a power user and a nerd but im not that technical lol
its actually the first time i learned that ntfs drives have meta tags like $mft and stuff
its like entering into a whole new rabbit hole