Can Software not be installed because the HDD is compressed?

[Black Panther]

Compressed as in right-clicking the Drive, selecting Properties and checking 'compress drive to save disk space'?

Personally I don't think so...

However that's what my dad got told. Also that he has to reformat his laptop to get rid of the compression. I checked out the laptop and unchecked the 'compress drive' box however I kept getting messages that such and such a file can't be uncompressed (probably because it concerned a service being in use). I tried the same thing in safe mode and disabling services etc but I still couldn't get his drive to totally uncompress.

Now I wouldn't mind reformatting my dad's laptop.

However I want this software to be installed on my laptop as well - and that's why I wanted to know if what this guy's saying makes sense or not.

I checked my own drive, and the 'compress drive' button was checked, so I unchecked it... and started getting the same messages I got on dad's laptop. Basically most of my drive had been uncompressed for some reason (and I further screwed by alternating compress and uncompress) so while before all the file and folder names were in black now I've got just 2 or 3 folders which are in blue...

Now I really don't want to format my own laptop... I'm in the process of manually choosing these folders for uncompression again...

I'd like to know if this is just an excuse and this person's just mickeying around though...

[FordGT90Concept]

AFAIK, drive compression is transparent to the installer. That is, the file system automatically compresses on save and uncompresses on load so it's as if it was always uncompressed. Obviously, that has a latency penalty.

Personally, I disable compression after installing Windows so I don't have to deal with it in the future.


The messages you are receiving is because the conundrum that is created when changing compression state. That is, if an application is currently reading compressed file "blah.blah," the OS cannot uncompress, delete "blah.blah" and replace it with the uncompressed "blah.blah." You'd probably have to decompress the files via DOS--more trouble than its worth.


Another caveat: even with compression disabled, Windows will still compress things like backups created during an update process. It is never 100% disabled.