 How to Shrink and Expand NTFS Volumes in Windows |
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 Dec 18 2006, 11:28 PM
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A brief excerpt of the tutorial can be found here: In the past when you needed to resize a partition in Windows you had to use a 3rd party utility such as Partition Magic, Disk Director, or open source utilities such as Gparted and Ranish Partition Manager. These 3rd party programs, though, are no longer needed when using Windows Vista as Vista has partition, or volume, resizing functionality built directly into the Vista Disk Management utility. You may be wondering why someone would want to resize a Windows volume. One reason would be if you want to install another operating system such as linux, but do not have enough free space to create a new partition for it. By shrinking the Windows volume, you can free up enough space to create a new partition that can be used to dual boot into linux. Now lets say after trying linux, you decide its not for you. Now you are left with all this leftover space that is not being used by Windows. To reuse this space, you simply need to expand, or extend as Vista calls it, an existing Windows volume so that it uses all the available free space that was previously being used by linux. When resizing volumes in Windows Vista you must be aware of the following criteria: You only have the ability to shrink or expand NTFS or RAW (unformatted) partitions using Windows Vista tools. When you shrink a partition, unmovable files such as a page file or a shadow copy storage area are not relocated. Therefore you cannot decrease the size of the Windows volume beyond where these types of files are located. If you need to further shrink the volume, you will need to remove, move, or delete the page file or shadow copy storage area first, then shrink the volume, and then add the page file or shadow copy storage area back to the drive. If enough bad clusters are found on the disk the partition will not be allowed to shrink. You must be logged into an Administrator account in order to resize Windows Volumes in Vista. It is important to note the terms partition and volume are used interchangeably and you will see both of these terms used throughout the tutorial. Now that we know what we can and cannot do, lets start learning how to shrink and expand, or extend, Windows Vista volumes! We hope you find this tutorial helpful. The Bleeping Computer Staff |
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