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I am trying to partition my c drive into 2 drives. My c drive has 412 GB free of 450 GB. I wish to participate as 30 GB: 382 GB. But when i try to shrink volume (by going through My Computer --> Manage --> Disk Management) i see that i can shrink around 200 GB. I believe that we cannot shrink upto certain volume due to unmovable files located.

Hence i tried to defrag the c drive using Windows defrag + http://www.piriform.com/defraggler.

Step 2: I then tried clearing restore files & also disabled hibernation. After doing second step, now it is showing that 0 GB is available for shrinking (= shrinking not possible).

What should i do that could make me happy? I know it is possible but do not remember the steps.

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  • please help.. your inputs are badly needed
    – xorpower
    Nov 11, 2011 at 22:00
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    If your having issues partitioning due to unmovable files just use a partition program that works outside of the os, like Gparted. Nov 11, 2011 at 22:26
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    I still recommend against Gparted. Its NOT newbie friendly. You can murder everything pretty fast. Easeus Partition Manager is more newbie friendly and it doesnt take 3 hours to take 500mb off of a 380 gb partition
    – sinni800
    Nov 11, 2011 at 22:34
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    @sinni800 that is very odd. I use the builtin Gparted tool with clonezilla weekly to extend and shrink partitions depending on my setup and it works about as fast as partition magic, which I used previously. Although I can't say I've ever timed it. Nov 11, 2011 at 22:37
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    Very odd. I resized the partition twice and it always did it... Easeus just moves the files out of the way and shrinks. This is just my personal experience though, and as you might know, personal experiences can be VERY diverse and different :).
    – sinni800
    Nov 11, 2011 at 22:41

4 Answers 4

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Windows' own disk management utility is really weird sometimes, I can relate.

Easeus offers a free partitioning tool here. I can really recommend it.

Still, use it at your own risk and always look again and again before applying a change, so you understand what you are doing right now.

I would also NOT recommend you to resize it to 30 gb. Make it 60 or even 80. I have filled 60 gigabytes and the Windows folder alone had like 25 GB!

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    +1 for the partition size: winsxs can be upwards of 16GB (even though some of that is erroneous reporting, due to file links, the OS still behaves as though the space is in use)
    – horatio
    Nov 11, 2011 at 22:52
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    easeus rocks!!!
    – xorpower
    Nov 11, 2011 at 23:09
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Boot to a Gparted live cd and you should be able to resize your partition and create a new ones. Gparted will be able to move files around as they will not be locked in use by the OS.

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  • You missed one thing: Gparted sucks. Taking 500 mb from a 380 GB partition? It goes over the whole partition twice. It took me 4 hours to do that. I was bored so I used Firefox (on the boot CD) to surf a little bit. Turns out that if you change the keyboard layout while it is running and then exit Firefox, X.org will EXIT and take Gparted with it (YES, It will exit gparted while it is running. Mercilessly) This is a beginner's failure, I know, but HOW should I know? Well in the end I lost about 20 GB of unimportant data (games, can reinstall them anytime) and 5 hours of chkdsk.exe.
    – sinni800
    Nov 11, 2011 at 22:32
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    I have never had a problem with Gparted... however as far as your firefox issue, that does suck. Nov 11, 2011 at 22:34
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Gparted Live, but read and understand FAQ, "Use GParted to Resize the Windows 7 or Vista Partition" mini-howto and Vox Populi (STFW) in common

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You need to use a third-party repartitioning tool. The Windows partition resizer is not very smart. Specifically, it can only do repartitions that can be done while the system is running.

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