mechanic wrote:
On Tue, 14 Nov 2017 01:11:13 -0500, Paul wrote:

I can relate a funny story about Win10 install. I originally had a
data partition, one where I'd formatted NTFS with 32K clusters,
instead of 4K clusters. I didn't even think about it at the time,
and did a Win10 install (apparently without the partition being
reformatted) right into that partition....

Why would the installer worry about the cluster size? Files don't
care, do they?

NTFS compression and encryption don't work unless
the cluster size is the default 4KB. But why that
should affect the install, I couldn't begin to guess.
Especially as it had worked for so many Insider
updates previous to that.

I presume a utility like "compact" would throw
an error if you tried to use it on a 32KB cluster
NTFS partition. The utility "cleanmgr", for one
of its tick boxes, decides to NTFS compress some files
in winsxs. That's an example of where there might
be a dependency. But would an OS installer run
cleanmgr ? I hope not.

compact /?

Compact is an evil piece of crap, because the person
who wrote it, neglected to preserve all the properties
of the file being compacted. Which means that everyone
else who needs to use it, has to do a lot of extra work
to tidy up afterwards. Like, if a file is owned
by TrustedInstaller, if I run Compact, it ends up
being owned by me. This is not typically what you
expect of such a transformation. You just want the
thing compressed, not "ruined".

Paul