Here’s my first post.

Problem

I’ve recent PV’d a failing server to VMware, however the old server had a 250GB disk but only was using 10GB of it.

VMware converter wouldn’t let me re-size the disk so I ended up just doing a full copy, now the disk is a thin disk but is taking up 250GB.

The server only needs a 40GB disk so I tried to shrink it with gparted but I was getting an error about bad sectors, as per the warning message I ran chkdsk /r /f several times but all was ok, however gparted wouldn’t run.

I know I could have used ntfsresize -bad-sectors, but I know the disk doesn’t have bad sectors.

This made m start thinking if I could reset the bad sector count on the partition, I’ve written how I did this below.

Instructions

The instructions below assume the NTFS partition is on /dev/sda1

  1. Make sure you have a full backup before proceeding

  2. Download gparted live cd

  3. When the cd has booted click on terminal type:

     ntfsinfo -i 8 /dev/sda1

  4. The command will output similar to the below screenshot Screenshot 1

  5. Make a note of the Allocated size for the ‘$Bad’ attribute, as indicated by the red line above type:

     ntfstruncate /dev/sda1 8 0x80 '$Bad' 0

  6. In the next command you will need to use the allocated size from the previous step type:

     ntfstruncate /dev/sda1 8 0x80 '$Bad' <value from previous step>
 ntfstruncate /dev/sda1 8 0x80 '$Bad' 250048479232

    Screenshot Screenshot 2

  7. You can now size the partition with gparted

I hope others find this useful.

Matt