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Sunday Nov 21, 2010

PQ PartitionMagic 983

On my Windows XP laptop, the C: drive partition had become too small. So, I freed up some space just after it to grow it to double its size. There are many ways to do that, but my favorite tool is PowerQuest's PartitionMagic. However it failed with an "Error 983 - Too many errors found, process halted.".

Googling that message proved that I wasn't the only one. The solutions ranged from doing a "Disk Cleanup" to running "chkdsk /f". An interesting suggestion was to remove old Restore Points on Microsoft's Support site. I tried all of those, but to no avail. And then there are the many "PC Health" or "Download 983 Repair Tool" ads at the top of the Google page. Everything else failing I opted for one of those, paid thirty bucks and let it do its magic. An hour later I tried Partition Magic again, but error 983 was still there.

While doing all that, I noticed an option in PQ Magic to convert the partition from NTFS to FAT32. That sounded intrusive enough :) that it could fix this 983 error. I went ahead and not surprisingly also that one failed, but now with an "Error 1681 - Data is compressed or sparse.". Researching this on the Symantec support site, suggested to "Turn off System Restore".

System Restore

You find that option by right clicking "My Computer" (if your Desktop doesn't have a shortcut to My Computer, do this in Windows Explorer) and then click "Properties". Select the "System Restore" tab and enable "Turn off System Restore on all drives". Having done that, I went back to Partition Magic to try the resize operation again (yes, I put my convert to FAT32 on the back burner). Suddenly all went well and two minutes later I had doubled the size of my C: drive.

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