unable to shrink c drive for new partition

See attached please

Cannot shrink the C:\ drive to create a new partition.

using Vista Ultimate 64bit with SP1 refresh 2

I am having a similar issue. It's not that it won't let you shrink, its just not letting you input a large number of MB for some reason. I'm on Ultimate x64 (no sp1) and it says i can only partition 137MB when my hdd has 70GB left. Any ideas why this is happening?

Am i better off using a program like Paragon partition manager? I just don't see why I should have to...

try defragmenting the drive you want to shrink. fragmentation causes free space to be "broken up and scattered on the drive". when it's defragmented, the free space is consolidated at the end of the drive. at least i think it works something like that.

How much free space is left on the drive? Do you have system restore/shadow copyies turned on? That will take up a good deal of space (up to 15% of your total HD space, I believe), but it won't count against free space calculation.

@chad can u shrink the other drives ? If yes, then i think the issue may be shrinking of C: which has Vista installed.

You can use Acronis Disk Director or Paragon Partition magic to resize the C: .

I did chkdsk which took about an hour. That did not solve it. System restore had already been disabled as well and cleaned up a few days ago. I defragmented and that did not fix the problem either. I am only able to shrink up to 200MB on the C: partition. Strange issue.

Can you post a screenshot of the total/free space on C:

Here is the screenshot

I found this link in google groups. Read the post by Richard Urban, MS MVP. Apparently the vista partition util can utilize free space up until it runs into certain system files. It would appear that some people had luck by removing the pagefile.sys. If you have enough RAM, you could set your paging file to 0 bytes (under advanced system properties), and see if that helps the util. Worst case, you could always re-enable your virtual memory.

Otherwise, Acronis Disk Director isn't too much at $50.

The problem will be files that are "blocking" the shrinking of the partition - defragmenting should should solve the problem.

If not, the chances are that the master file table (MFT) is in the way, and it needs to be defragmented - this can only be defragmented with a boot defragmentation. I don't know if you can do that with the standard windows defragmentation tool but I know you can with diskeeper (you can download a 30 day trial version, run it once, and select boot time defragmentation options> move the paging file and move the MFT).