Windows 8 - Compress Drive did not continue after cancel/reboot

Question

I checked the "Compress Drive" option on an external drive (1TB) on Windows 8. After clicking OK, the OS started to compress the files folder by folder on the drive. As it took too long, I shutdown the PC while the operation was still in progress.

After the reboot I saw that half of the files and folders were compressed, but the OS did not continue to compress the remaining files.

The only thing I can do is uncheck "Compress Drive" option (all files are decompressed) and then do again "Compress Drive" to start the process from stretch.

As this will take hours, Im looking for a way to tell windows to continue the previous cancelled operation of compressing the drive. Are the any solutions on that?

Answer 1

As long as a directory is marked as compressed, any new file/directory copied into it would be compressed as well. All you need now is compressing the leftover files by running:

compact /c /s G: /i /q *.*

/c is for compressing, /s is for compressing all subdirectories, replace G: with your drive letter, /i is for ignoring files that are being used or can't be compressed, /q is for reducing the amount of info reported (slowing down), and *.* is for picking every file.

Answer 2

What went wrong I wrote in my above post? I now know. Well i found out it's been a while I used DOS Commands, so my fault. Try again.

1. Open Run > CMD > C:\Users\MyUserName> (default)
2. C:\Users\MyUserName> cd /d E: (change dir to root of target volume )
3. E:> compact /c /i /s:\ (run command from root folder: ENTER and run!)

This made it work flawlessly, compress / uncompress / compress

Thanks Martheen