I am trying to shrink my drive on Windows 10 but I keep running into Microsoft or NTFS files

Question

After days of work I managed to get the Windows disk manager to show available shrink space of 490GB (my actual free space). After multiple tries of smaller and smaller sizes I keep running into either Microsoft files like:

• \Windows\Prefetch\AgGlGlobalHistory.db::$DATA
• \ProgramData\Microsoft\Network\Downloader\qmgr0.dat::$DATA
• \ProgramData\USOShared\Logs\UpdateSessionOrchestration.001.etl::$DATA
• \Users\Chris\AppData\Local\Microsoft\TokenBroker\Cache\5ad5f39014e0e31842e0dcf87f990a3931fea5ad.tbres::$DATA

and NTFS files like: "\$BitMap::$DATA"

I know this is possibly a duplicate of a lot of questions, but I have not found a clear answer to this issue. I even tried to shrink 150GB and I wasn't able to.

Answer 1

So, answer has been found!

Those Microsoft and NTFS files were viewed from event viewer at event id 259. The real thing you should see is event id 260. It will give you exact information on what to delete and it isn't files from NTFS or Microsoft. Mine happened to be Google Photos.

So, try to shrink your drive, go to Event Viewer-Windows Logs-Applications and search for the event id 260. That will give you the true information on what to delete!