Make room now works on drives Windows can't shrink. Everything here was tested on a real Windows 11 in a virtual machine, on real partitions, or both, unless it says otherwise. Physical PCs have had limited testing, so back up anything you can't lose.
Added
- Shrinking a drive from outside Windows. On some PCs, Windows can't move a few of its own files, such as
$Mft::$BITMAP, so it releases almost nothing from a drive with plenty free: 0 GB of 197 GB free on one Dell, about 1 GB in issue #6. When Windows' own way falls short, Make room now offers Shrink and restart. The PC restarts once into hop's shrink tool, which shrinks the drive withntfsresize, as GParted does, and restarts into Windows, where hop carries on. The tool is Fedora's signed startup files and a small Linux that does only that, so it starts with Secure Boot on. hop downloads it (24 MB) only on a PC that needs it, and checks it against checksums built into hop.- It checks everything before changing anything. It doesn't start if Windows is hibernated or part way through an update, the drive needs a disk check, the PC is on battery, or the disk is MBR, USB or a clone.
- It can't shrink an encrypted drive, so it asks for BitLocker or Device encryption to be off first.
- Afterwards, hop has Windows' own disk check scan the drive, removes the tool, and Undo gives the space back.
- Tested on Windows 11 with Secure Boot on: C: went from 127 GB to 82 GB, every file was the same afterwards, and the disk check found no errors.
- Omarchy 4.5.0, tested installing next to Windows in a virtual PC, with and without encryption, and with 4 GB of memory. When omarchy.org offers a version hop hasn't tried yet, hop installs the newest one it has instead of refusing.
Changed
- Make room is part of choosing the size. The slider reaches as far as the drive's free space, with the part Windows can't release yet striped. Drag into it and the button becomes Make room, which says how much Windows releases now and what it takes to get the rest.
Fixed
- Make room's space could be taken again before the install. Closing hop, restarting or waiting too long could let the paging file come back at the end of the drive (issue #6). Make room now shrinks the drive as soon as there's room, so the space waits after it, and turns everything back on straight away.
- Remove the installer could stop CachyOS starting, at "no such partition". Windows renumbers partitions after one it removes, and CachyOS's GRUB finds its partition by number. hop now checks Linux's boot files first, and when they'd break, it keeps the partition as a drive called SHARED that Windows and Linux can both use, and says why. If this already happened to you, open an issue and we'll help you get Linux starting again.
- Make room could give up on
$Mft::$BITMAPwithout moving any of it (issue #6). It now moves the part NTFS can move, stops at once on a move NTFS will never make, and logs why. - hop keeps the PC awake through the whole install, including the download and the copy.
- Make room's safety task reads its saved time the same way on every PC. On the Thai or Arabic calendar, it could put the settings back 20 minutes after a restart.
- Debian's and CachyOS's steps match their real installer screens, and find Windows' EFI partition the way each installer shows it.
- When an ordinary file limits the shrink, hop tries to move it, and if that doesn't work, names it and says what to do.
Full list in the changelog.