Vista - Disk Management - Shrink Partition

Your welcome Premkumar.

MS probably restiricts the Disk Manager to help prevent potential data loss and make the program easier to use, where the 3rd party pay for programs do include the full features. Plus, I would imagine that MS would get slapped with another anti-trust lawsuit if they included a full featured disk management program by the other program makers.

Shawn

Hello,

Good tutorial, but i have a question. I'm trying to shrink one of my partitions and take the space at add it to another partition, already created with data on it. Is this posible with Vista's tool or do i have to use a 3rd party program?

Hi VenomSnake, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Sorry, but no. You will need to use a 3rd party program like Acronis True Image for that. You can use a 15 day fully fuctional trial version from here if you like.

Download backup software trial of HDD ghosting, data backup and restore software for home and home office PCs

Sorry,
Shawn

I was logged as admin and computer management was launched explicitly as admin by UAC. After msg about counting possible size and confirming new one, I got repeatedly access denied msg when trying to shrink Vista64 system partition. I was able to shrink vista64 system partition only in Safe mode.

I tried to shrink my partition and althought on hard disk properties I have 60 gb free space on a 250gb stat drive, it shows 0 amount in mb to reduce/shrink and the shrink option is therefore ghosted. Can you help?

So you must have any unmovable files at the end of partition. Try to set temporary pagefile to different partition, or at least set to other size. run "powercfg -h -off" to (temporary) turn off hibernation file. ( when succesful at resizing, you can run "powercfg -h -on" to turn it back on ). Try to delete your restore points. Reboot. Try resize again. If does not help, so I recommned you 3rd party defragmenters for partition offline/boot defragmentation like Raxco Perfectdisk. Some partition managers can do partition offline resize too.

Thanks Poutnik, unfortunately despite removing all my restore points, closing hibernation and removing everything during disk clean that was safe to do, I scrapped 10gb which in my opinion is shameful.
The drive is a Maxtor 250gb Sata HD and going to my computer, properties and checking on free space, shows that 160gb is being used and that I have 60gb free, so why can I only return 10gb?
I was considering using partition manager but am I mistaken in thinking this is no good for a Vista home premium 64 bit os? Another thing is, if partition manager is suitable to correct this issue, why can't vista's own system sort it out? I have tried everything I can think of after doing lots of solutions discussed on the web but nothing as yet. As they say in Star wars, "Help me Vistax64, your my only hope"

Hi Carnage,

I'm not sure what brand of Partion Manager you are referring to, but the Acronis and Paragon brand will work with Vista 64 bit and do what you are wanting.

The Disk Manager feature in Vista is a slimmed down free version that is limited to not beng able to move the type of files that you ran into. Only the pay for 3rd party programs can move these unmovable files that Disk Manager cannot. It is all part of the antitrust issues that Microsoft is having about the alleged unfair business practices of including features or programs for free in the OS in an attempt to kill the sales of other software companies.

Shawn

Mentioned items are not the only unmoveable files in NTFS partitions,
just those one can easily temporary throw away.
Some were left in their places.

PerfectDisk defragmenter has a special boot driver, that moved these files before windows startup and lock them.
Some partition manager does the same, or provides a boot CD, that defragment system partition unmounted, "from outside".
( like paragon partition manager - I used great PPM 8 boot CD, but unfortunately it does not see my new SATA drive)

some other maybe - not sure - use some maintenance partition to boot here, and run from this place.

Shawn,

I'm trying to partition my HDD to get 20 Gigs out of the C: drive but there are immovable system files near the end of the drive. I got a free trial of Acronis Disk Director Suite and made a partition using that but before i restarted to make sure it worked i looked at the drive map using Perfect Disk 2008. It was disturbing becuase it said that 90% of my files were "excluded" or files locked by the windows OS. So i un-did the partition in fear of making windows crash on the next re-boot. Should i have gone thru with it to see if it would have worked?

Thanks in advance for any insight
Bryan