Howto Reduce The WinSxS Folder in Windows 7

In this blogpost I will describe how to reduce the WinSxS folder in the Windows folder after installing SP1. All superseded files are removed. And you cannot uninstall SP1 anymore. To know what the WinSxS folder is, read this blogpost of Joseph Conway.

First off all, how big is my WinSxS folder? Right click on it says around 9GB.

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But it contains hardlinks, so how big is it for real?? Download ctTrueSize. Run: ctts C:\Windows\WinSxS

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9,35GB – 1,04GB = 8,30GB

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HowTo: Reinstalling Windows on a BitLocker encrypted system

In my previous post I enabled BitLocker on both my partitions (Link). The trick now is to reinstall Windows without decrypting the system. In this example my data is stored on the second partition (Data Partition or D:) and that partition is encrypted and must be preserved.

When booted from media. The installer is asking on which partition it will install Windows. Because BitLocker has encrypted the old system partition, we aren’t able to format the partition. Just delete the partition, recreate it, format and install Windows. (Do not touch the data partition). If you want to preserve the data on the old system partition, you have to recover that partition. (Hmmm new post will come in the future Knipogende emoticon)

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