How To: Resize, Expand, And Shrink A Disk Partition In Windows Vista
There comes a time when you need to resize a disk partition on Windows Vista. Most Windows users typically have to use third party software’s such as Disk Director, Partition Magic, Ranish Partition Manager, or Gparted. However, downloading and using this disk partitioning software takes time and money.Luckily for Windows Vista users, there is a built-in disk partitioning application on the Vista Disk Management Utility.Windows Disk Management console in Windows Vista allow users to shrink, extend, create, and format partitions without any third party tools.You can shrink a single partition with unused space, and then create a new partition in the resulting free space, as well as extending a current partition if there is available free space after it.
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 in Windows Vista, 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 Windows Vista.
Read on to find out how to resize a partition in Windows Vista.
- Click on the Windows Vista Start menu
- Right click on Computer and select Manage
- On User Account Control(UAC) dialog, click Continue
- In the left pane of Computer Management console, open up the Storage category and click on Disk Management.
- You will find here your allocated disk space for each partitions.To shrink a current volume, locate the partition to be resized from the Disk Manager, right click on it, and from the menu select Shrink Volume.
- On Shrink dialog box, you can enter the amount of space in MB to shrink the partition. This dialog box will show you the current size of the partition, the size of available shrink space available, and the total size after shrinking. When you have selected the amount of space to shrink the partition, click Shrink button.
- When this operation has completed, you will now see that you have a selected amount of unallocated free space available.
- To extend any volume, locate the partition to be resized from the Disk Manager, right click on it, and from the menu select Extend Volume. The Wizard will then open up, click Next. You will then be presented with a dialog box to select the disks to extend. Select the amount of space in MB to extend the volume, and click Next. The selected partition will then be extended by the amount selected.
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Written by Tony on September 2nd, 2008 with
1 comment.
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#1. February 2nd, 2010, at 5:22 PM.
A tool Extend Partition Home Edition can extend partition on Windows Vista, http://www.extend-partition.com/