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I am trying to shrink my C: drive to make another partition where I am planning to install Debian.

When I try to shrink the partition, it says:

Size of available shrink space in MB = 0

Is there anyway to go around this?

I am using a laptop with 64 bit Windows 7.

The hardrive has 673ish GB of space and has got 361 GB of free space on C:.

Well i wanted to upload a picture but i need at least 10 reputation... the disk manager on win7 showed spaces on disk0, 2 without name and C:, the first one 25 GBs Healthy Primary partition, the second one shows system reserved 100 MB NTFS Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition) and the last one C: 673.54 GBs NTFS Healthy(Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition)

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  • Did you search the site for similar posts?
    – golimar
    Feb 13, 2015 at 8:02
  • Post a link to any file sharing service you use and someone will add it to your question. What method are you using to try to shrink the partition? Are you getting any type of message, such as the existence of immovable files that prevent shrinkage?
    – fixer1234
    Feb 13, 2015 at 8:04

4 Answers 4

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When I install Ubuntu and other similar linux distros, it allows me to shrink the Windows partition during the install.

The Debian resources show a similar functionality as well.

To losslessly resize an existing FAT or NTFS partition from within debian-installer, go to the partitioning step, select the option for manual partitioning, select the partition to resize, and simply specify its new size.

https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch03s05.html.en

It's a good idea to back up your data first, if you can.

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  • A couple of caveats. You will likely need or want to run chkdsk afterwards because Windows often gets indigestion from resized partitions. Investigate how the repartitioning tool handles "immovable" files. You don't want those moved without proper procedures or you can mess up the Windows installation.
    – fixer1234
    Feb 13, 2015 at 8:09
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That's wired. The disk management should support the situation. I test it, it is OK.

Or you try EaseUS Partition Free.

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Yes that is, odd. Anyway it is not recommended to partition a hard drive for Linux in Windows. Debian may have Gparted pre loaded to a live disk during a GUI install, if not boot into a copy of GParted or Ubuntu and open the program. Select your Windows %systemDrive% and resize it, The program has a nice slider and + and - buttons to make it perfectly even. After all that click apply and it should resize your partition so you have free space for Debian.

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TLDR version: I successfully used Ubuntu LiveCD and gparted to shrink my main Windows 7 partition. The rest is just detailing it out for beginners/what I would've liked to know prior to my adventure....And that I did all the risky work on spare hardware, so my data was not in danger.

I was trying to shrink a 500GB hard drive with 100GB of data to the point where I could fit it onto a 250GB SSD. Windows defrag and Auslogics DiskDefrag (free at the moment) got it so that I could shrink the C partition most of, but not all the way. Between system reserved, C, and Recovery partition (in that order), there was about 280 GB partitioned; too large for the new SSD. Here's how I got it to work. Note: what I did was risky. I had backups and I did all my work on a spare HDD, never actually touching my original drive.

Step 0. Use Windows partition manager to shrink the partition as much as possible. This is best practice, but it didn't work for me.

  1. Ran Auslogics to find out how data was spread across my C partition. It turns out Windows was putting like 40 tiny system files in the middle of the C partition, preventing the partition manager from shrinking it further.

  2. I took a system image and put it onto a spare hard drive. (I used Windows "create system image", went over to a spare computer and restored that image to the spare HDD using a Windows install usb) Again, I did not work on off my current hard drive, only off the spare copy. After I completed this step, I had a bootable copy of my original system running on a spare computer.

  3. On my spare system, I booted off of a Ubuntu LiveCD. Install media for Ubuntu desktop comes with a "try Ubuntu" option: this is what a "LiveCD" is. It has Ubuntu run off of a USB stick, and your HDD doesn't have any files actually being used. I ran gparted (CTRL+ALT+T to open terminal, "sudo gparted" to start the program).

  4. In GParted, I could see that the system files that I saw in Auslogics weren't there anymore; they were apparently temp files that Windows creates during boot, and those files were just set to be like 200GB into the partition. I shrunk the C partition to an acceptable size, and moved the recovery partition to the end of the C partition. Total size came out to 230GB. Hit OK to make the changes. Shut down the system.

  5. Boot the spare computer off of the spare hard drive. The first time I booted it, Windows automatically ran startup repair, and fixed whatever it needed to fix, and booted into Windows. This step is why I did everything on spare hardware, so that if it was corrupted, my original system was still intact. On the second boot, it booted perfectly. I had a fully functioning system that only took up the first 230GB of space on the spare 500GB HD.

  6. On the spare system, I made a system image using Windows. In my original system, replaced the original HDD with the new SSD. Booted off of Windows install media to restore the system image onto my new SSD. And that folks is how I got a 500GB HDD copied onto a 250GB SSD. Not easy, but it was an interesting challenge.

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