My Brother is a numpty!

clartymarty · 31 Mar 2014 at 09:22

As my title states he has done something to his computer. He has compressed his hard-drive with the OS on! so now it will not boot. Can you give me some guidance?

Thank you in advance

Khazzer · 31 Mar 2014 at 09:42

Has he tried using the recovery facility from the Windows distribution disk? In the console he could also run chkdsk /r to repair any problems with the disk caused by the compression.

colax · 31 Mar 2014 at 13:40

How did he compress his OS files while it was running? You might have to place the HDD in a second pc to decompress, or use a Linux LiveCD.

Qitarah · 31 Mar 2014 at 21:02

I had no idea that was even possible 0_o

On Holiday · 31 Mar 2014 at 21:16

How did he manage to compress the whole drive..?

thel33ter · 31 Mar 2014 at 21:22

I did that once (quiet you) You need to restore the MBR, boot it from an iso/disc/whatever and open the recovery tools bit, then follow this http://www.tomshardware.com/news/win7-windows-7-mbr,10036.html

thel33ter · 31 Mar 2014 at 21:27

And for those wondering how it was done, this basically. Windows will dutifully start compressing your entire drive, including the Windows folder which makes for a sad computer.

Admetos · 31 Mar 2014 at 22:40

The compression built into Windows is absolutely no problem, I run this for years on HDD's and SSD's. It's no less reliable than creating a zip file.

What has most likely happened is there was an issue with the C drive before you started the compression. When the compressed files were re-saved it's exposed an issue that already existed.

On Holiday · 31 Mar 2014 at 22:43

I wouldn't have thought such an option would be easily accessible if it were likely to break stuff?

Then again I've never really looked into that option or what it does/advantages..

thel33ter · 31 Mar 2014 at 22:51

The compression itself works well if you use it on files you access within windows, so documents ect, but if you set it going on your entire boot drive it breaks stuff, beats me as to why Microsoft hasn't thought to change it through.

Admetos · 1 Apr 2014 at 02:14

thel33ter said:
but if you set it going on your entire boot drive it breaks stuff

The windows compression if anything increases reliability as the compressed data is being stored on less physical storage space than it otherwise would have been.

I have compression running on all my machines, including servers. The only files Microsoft will not allow compression on is SQL Server data files, but this is for performance reasons.

thel33ter · 1 Apr 2014 at 08:25

I'm simply stating experience, and its a known problem, googling the issue brings up several people with the same problem.

Admetos · 1 Apr 2014 at 10:38

Yes but it's not NTFS compression software it's the underlining HDD.

When you enable compression on a HDD it typically takes a long time to compress all the files. The HDD is never normally put under such strain and any HDD issues will suddenly show then.

It's the same as windows defragmentation that could takes hours if a drives heavily fragmented. Any existing issues with the HDD they will show after the defrag.

varkanoid · 1 Apr 2014 at 13:59

its only advisable to use compression on files you dont access often. Depending on your CPU performance takes a hit as every file thats compressed it needs to uncompress it first to access it before running/using it.

It would have been helpful if the OP could have stated exactly why it wont boot up, eg what happens, errors etc/

Admetos · 1 Apr 2014 at 15:16

varkanoid said:
its only advisable to use compression on files you dont access often. Depending on your CPU performance takes a hit as every file thats compressed it needs to uncompress it first to access it before running/using it.

That is only sometimes true, there are cases where compression speeds up disk access. Here's an example using a 1MB text file.

Typically a text file will compress 16 times with NTFS compression. If you have a 1MB text file it's going to use 256 4k clusters. If your data is stored on HDD the arm has got to move to each of those clusters. With compression your looking at as little as 16 clusters, more important it's potentially 16 times less IO the HDD has todo.

Now the question. Is the time lost of compressing / uncompressing the file less or more compared to the time saved by reduced HDD IO. I say in this situation compression will improve overall disk access.

Years ago there was something called 'Turbo Loading' on the Commodore 64. Someone discovered that the 6502 CPU could uncompress files faster than it would reading the uncompressed data from a tape. It also made loading from tape more reliable as there was less tape to read so less chance of having a read error.