I have my friend’s laptop with a C Drive that is 310 GB and only 70 GB is
utilized with the rest remaining free. I tried to shrink the volume through
Windows’ disk management feature, but it doesn’t allow me to shrink beyond about
5 GB. Please advise what can be done in this case.
In this excerpt from
Answercast #53, I look at a case where Windows partition management is
unable to resize partitions.
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What can be done to resize a partition?
In short, not a lot with Windows.
There is one thing you can try: Try defragging that drive. In fact, defrag
it a couple of times.
What’s probably happening is that there are some files in the way that
Windows either won’t or can’t move. That will prevent a volume from shrinking
past the point of those files.
Disk partition management
Now, to be honest, Windows disk management, while I really appreciate the
things that they’ve added to it in Windows 7… Windows disk management isn’t
the most robust or most complete set of tools.
The other approach that I would take (that probably will work for you) is to
go out and look for EaseUS disk
management utilities. They have a free partition manager that should,
actually, do pretty much what you want.
They have a fairly robust tool. It’s been around for quite awhile and has a
fairly good reputation. That should be able to resize the partitions pretty
much any way you want.
Be sure to back up!
About the only real advice I have for you before you use that tool is, of
course, to make sure that you are completely backed up.
Disk partitioning is one of those things where, if it goes wrong, it can go
horribly wrong and really cause a lot of data loss. So make sure you’re
completely backed up before you give it a try.
But run out and try EaseUS partition manager and see if that doesn’t let you
resize the partitions the way you want.
End of Answercast #53. Back to – Audio Segment
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The best tool I have found for that kind of operation is the bootable CD of Partition Wizard ( http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html ). It is the last entry on the webpage. Burn this to CD and load with the CD from the optical drive.
I prefer to use gparted
in Linux from a bootable USB flash drive. It too, is an established product.
I too would endorse Partition Wizard, especially its free bootable disk (image).
But note that NTFS grabs unmovable space for its directory in the middle of a partition, setting a limit on how much the size can be reduced. But there are ways …