Partition reduction failed

[pimjoosten]

When restoring an image to a smaller partition I received the message “Partition reduction failed (3/2/14848) The target partition will be deleted.”. Following the instructions in the KB-article: https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/kb ... partition/ I then restored the image without compacting to another drive and performed chkdsk /f which corrected errors. I then tried to copy that partition to the target drive with compacting. However, I received the same error message. Compacting on the extra drive and then copying the partition to the target drive did work however. What could be the cause that compacting while copying did not work, but copying after compacting did? This was with IFL v3.56.

[TeraByte Support]

The partition has to be in perfect shape for a restore/copy with compact to work. The two work completely different even though the same name.

[pimjoosten]

Thanks for your reply. Two follow-up questions, so that I get this right for future cases. Am I correct in my understanding that chkdsk (and possibly memtest86) is the only thing I can do before trying to compact with restore/copy and that it may still fail then? And that in that case restoring/copying onto an extra drive, performing chkdsk, compacting and then copying is the only solution?

[TeraByte Support]

Compact with copy/restore is a last resort, if it's already compacted or would fit based on where data is, just normal scaling would work. But yes, if there is a file system issue then resizing can fail (it may exist but not new size) and compacting (unusable if failure). Running the chkdsk /f on the partition is best thing (memtest is to ensure checking / resizing doesn't cause corruption). You also have the option that something like copywin.tbs could copy out the files depending on what the file system error is.

[pimjoosten]

Thanks for the explanation.