Got a Vista laptop with Wubi Ubuntu installed (read: Ubuntu on virtual disks located on the NTFS partition). I only use Ubuntu, but the disk performance is so poor that I want to switch to a normal partition install.

The problem is that the disk was quite full in it's time (~8 GB were free from 130GB), so the USN journal is scattered all over the disk, and since it's unmovable, making the disk partition impossible.

The only thing I can do is to delete it. I looked at a number of sites, Microsoft's Technet counted, but I still don't really understand the risks of the deleting the journal.

What am I risking? Would you recommend doing it?

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2 Answers

The USN journal's purpose is to provide a complete list of filesystem changes to various userspace programs like virus scanners or file indexers (e.g. "Everything").

You can safely delete this journal, using fsutil on Windows, or rm on Linux (ntfs-3g):

fsutil usn deletejournal C:

It's a good idea to recreate it later though:

fsutil usn createjournal m=0 a=0 C:

Do not confuse the change/USN journal with the one used by NTFS itself, which is kept in $LogFile. The NTFS journal (log) is a required component, used to prevent filesystem corruption.

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The correct command line to delete the USN journal is: fsutil usn deletejournal /D C:

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