Published February 1, 2011 | 
I’ve just finished migrating multiple partitions from a series of old hard drives onto brand new 2TB disks. I created the new partitions on my new HDDs and then used dd, or more specifically ddrescue, to copy the partition data over. When I booted into Windows though, the partitions were still showing as being their old sizes from when they were on the old HDDs. I made the (wrong) assumption that Windows would automatically correct it when it detected there was a discrepancy between the partition table and the indications within the partition.
I tried chkdsk and chkntfs to run and schedule Windows’ disk checker, but this found nothing of any particular interest and didn’t fix my problem. The solution I found was to use a tool like parted (or gparted) and shrink the partitions down by some arbitrary value (1MB in my case) , reboot, and run chkdsk again. This will hopefully change the size of the partition to be correct in Windows. Note that the disk management in Windows doesn’t seem to like to shrink the drives and fired back an error whenever I attempted it; I had to boot into gparted to resize them.
As they were only partitions I had used for archived files and such, I think a better solution in future would be to copy the files over, retaining permissions etc., rather than copy the raw data from the partition directly.
Published March 30, 2010 | Just a quick one here.
If you’ve found that the Windows games that come bundled with Windows Vista and Windows 7 no longer animate, it’s likely that you’ve tweaked with the options that determine the balance between visual effects and performance in Windows.
To fix this, press the Windows Key + Pause/Break simultaneously to bring up the System window. Select Advanced system settings from the options on the left and choose the top Settings button under Performance. On the visual effects tab, ensure that Animate controls and elements inside windows is checked and click Ok.
This will restore animations in games such as Solitaire, Freecell and Spider Solitaire at the expense of also enabling animated windows controls in other applications.
