Windows 7 and Shrink Volume

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Damager

2125 posts

Uber Geek

#35693 14-Jun-2009 21:11

Hi Team,

Running Windows 7 on my laptop. It has a 300GB hdd with about 100GB remaining.

Is it possible to shrink the volume to say 100GB and would data just automatically be shifted to the new remaining space?

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Regs

4066 posts

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Snowflake

#225043 14-Jun-2009 21:32

not quite sure what you are asking here... are you talking about compressing files?

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Damager

2125 posts

Uber Geek

#225051 14-Jun-2009 21:45

Hi Reg,

i realised that i didnt really word it properly!

On my lappys 300gb hdd, theres 100gb of space left . I wanted to have a 200gb partition for just data/media.

If theres only 100gb of free space left, can i successfully shrink the boot volume to 100gb, thereby leaving 200gb for a partition for data. In the process of shrinking the boot volume to 100gb, i assume that the remaining 100gb will just auto shift to the now remaining 200gb space/partition?

i hope i made a bit more sense. The reason i came up with this idea is that when windows was calculating what volume it could be shrunk to, it said 35gb. I thought that the volume could only be shrunk to the size of the used up data eg in my case, it could only be shrunk to a minimum of 200gb.

Since windows said it can be shrunk to 35gb, then i thought well, it should be able to do 100gb..

Flare

12 posts

Geek

#225077 14-Jun-2009 22:53

The reason why you cannot cut it all the way to 100GB is because that partition is being used by the OS (in this case, Windows 7) or reserved by the OS (or other programs possibly) to be used when it needs when RAM is completely filled and needs transferring to somewhere else without losing data.

and anyway, it's ALWAYS a good idea to leave at least 10GB free in a HDD (or SSD) for Windows Vista or Windows 7, or you risk losing data if you have too many programs open (or an excessive amount of data being processed)
I kept 5GB free all the time for my computers with Windows XP running and 200MB (of 800MB) free on my Pentium 1 with Windows 95
Linux kind of avoids this problem with their SWAP partition, but that's another story, I guess...

I'm actually not entirely sure on what I said, so correct me if I'm wrong.

Regs

4066 posts

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Snowflake

#225243 15-Jun-2009 14:26

you typicall cant shrink/extend the partition that windows is running on either - i've not tried this with win7 though. if i ever need to do that I remove the disk and add it to another machine so that i can resize/shrink everything accordingly.

creating new partitions and moving files around wont always work either - programs etc often have drive letter mappings whihc get broken when you shift a file from C:\ to D:\ (for example) so be careful with that. If you have 80GB of mp3's (for example) and move them to a new folder on D:\ you may have to rebuild your itunes or windows media player databses by deleting and re-adding the files.

All that said, is there a reason you want more than one partition? you can select a folder on your c:\ drive and tick the checkbox to 'compress' the contents. some files - e.g. pagefiles, mp3 files, video files etc - may not compress any more than they currently are so ticking this box may make no difference. i.e. you may not be able to physically shrink your current 200GB to 100GB....

Sales Engineer
Snowflake
www.snowflake.com

about.me/nzregs
Twitter: @nzregs

Flare

12 posts

Geek

#225546 16-Jun-2009 11:24

Actually, I've tried and successfully shrunk my Windows Vista partition while using it, and since Windows 7 is based on that, I don't see why not
yeah, better to do it with a computer that can connect your harddrive as an external
but a general rule (and properly one to follow) would be to not partition a partition that you do not want to risk losing data on, back it up on some other media first.

I'm only guessing you want to partition your drive to try out partitioning? or is it something like "I'm restricting my little brother's data to THIS partition" kind of thing?

Damager

2125 posts

Uber Geek

#225708 16-Jun-2009 21:57

I want to dual boot with windows 7 and xp. ive cleared half of the 300gb hdd on the laptop so i can shrink the current windows 7 boot partition to leave 100gb for a new partition and then install xp to it.

thanks reg and flare for your assistance!

amos

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#228705 26-Jun-2009 23:56

You can use the shrink volume tool in Win 7/Vista to reduce the size of an existing partition and then use the newly available space to create a new partition. I did this the other day to create a dual boot setup (using vista).

The problem I had was that despite having 250gb of free space, windows said I could only shrink the volume by 2gb! I overcame this problem by following these instructions:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/working-around-windows-vistas-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problems/

Interestingly, I made little progress until I used perfect disk. That made all the difference.

Hope this helps.