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I have a 300GB external harddrive. I was going to try and make a partition on it, which includes having to shrink the storage. When I did so, this is what I was shown:

Screenshot

How could it be so small if I have 112GB still free? I'm running Windows Vista, does anyone know how to solve this problem?

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Yeah, better put this up on superuser. – WebDevHobo Aug 21 '09 at 19:47
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migrated from serverfault.com Aug 21 '09 at 20:28

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2 Answers

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This is usually caused my unmovable files on the disk such as system files.

Do a defrag of the external disk and try it again?

You can completely get around it by using something like GParted. There are plenty of other free tools out there too. EASEUS Partition Manager helped me shrink my entire C: drive down and then create a second partition without a hitch. Prefer GParted though.

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By the way, if you want to go for the slightly easier method which does not involve burning a CD and leaving Windows, EASEUS Partition Manager can be downloaded from partition-tool.com/download.htm. (It works in Vista/Win 7 too.) – kez Aug 22 '09 at 15:58
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up vote 0 down vote

I've always been fond of Partition Magic for re-arranging the partitions on a disk. It can generally move around anything it needs to on the disk in order to make room for your new partitioning scheme.

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