A customer calls, saying he is concerned about the disks in his computer.

He has 3 drive letters C: D: G:

C: is 98% full, and he doesn’t want to spend time re-installing software if something goes wrong (he does have everything backed up to an external drive, but doesn’t want to spend the time restoring everything…)

I suggest resizing the partitions, and he agrees

I get there, look at his drives. he has 2 drives within the PC, C: and D: are 2 partitions on the first drive, and G: is a second drive.

All drives are FAT32… this should make it easier to resize them… and after that, I’ll probably convert them to NTFS

I install partition magic 8, and set out to shrink D:, so that I can grow C: effectivly giving more free space to C:.

But as soon as I try to shrink D:, I get “error #2002 There are invalid entries in the FAT”.

OK, this should be simple (the manual say it can be fixed with a scandisk), I try to do a scandisk (via the windows scandisk interface), but I get an error about the drive being in use… do you want to schedule a scandisk at windows reboot time? I say yes, then restart the PC.

The PC does the scandisk, then I try to shrink D: again, but I get the same error.

I figure maybe a conversion to NTFS might fix things, but it doesn’t.

OK, maybe something has D: “locked”. So I go and stop all the usual programs that might be busy scribbling to D:, but PM still refuses to resize.

I try a command-level chkdsk, and it seems to find more errors! I let it fix everything, and then, finally, PM no longer complains. I reckon the checkdisk at system startup didn’t really fix anything.

However, it also refuses to shrink D:… yet the other partitions are fine to resize… what now?

I shutdown skype and a few other background apps, and, at last, I can resize D:

I let PM do its thing, and then I finish up converting C: to NTFS as well, and I ask the customer to do a defrag, and I’m on my way again (after spending a lot of time waiting for converts and defrags and partition resizes to complete).