Hello,
I just bought a new laptop which runs on vista home premium 64bit. It has a single partition of 287 GB + a hidden system restore partition of 10 GB. I want to shrink the big system partition by 200 GB. It only allows me to shrink it by 127. This is after I have been through every single process described in the article on this page which deals with this subject. I have disabled everything + deleted the pagefile + hibernate file. I ran the Perfect Disk 10 2 times. I have 0% fragmentation but 16% fragmentation of metadata files. I couldn't figure out how to get rid of that. I am now thinking of formating the drive. Is there a way I could do that without having to reinstall vista ? for example..making a smaller partition in which to move vista than formating the first one and shrinking it than move back vista on the smaller partition and combine the two left into a 200 GB one ? I never installed an OS before. So sorry if I shocked you with my ignorance. I made recovery discs of vista. So if what I have said isn't posible then ..could I format the partition and then, by using the recovery discs, reinstall vista and deal with the partitioning during the process ? I also have a windows 7 upgrade coming next week. How will that help me deal with the problem..or will it not ? Thank you.
How-To Geek Forums » Windows Vista
How to shrink my C drive in vista ?
(4 posts)
I had this problem too. I have a 640GB drive initially all assigned as C:. I wanted it much smaller and a data drive created from it.
I repeatedly used Disk Manager and got it down to 175GB's and gave up. Each used of Disk Manager provided varying amounts of space, some very small, others larger. At the end, all were so small it was a waste of time and I stopped.
However, there is another alternative, actually 2 for the 64 bit versions that I know of.
One is here, USING GPARTED to shrink the drive. Another is PARTITION WIZARD. I've not used either of these, but they should work.
One thing you MUST do is BACK-UP your existing partition before doing anything with these. Something can go wrong and you could lose everything. Also, VERIFY that the back-up can be restored before you do it. I was using Norton Ghost 12.0, and I decided to restore the back-up to ensure nothing had happened. I then discovered that Ghost will NOT restore a back-up to a significantly smaller partition.
Irv S.
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