Vista small shrink

Update : Please note that this works in newer versions of the Windows operating system as well. A right-click on a partition and the selection of Shrink Volume will display the option to shrink the volume of the selected hard drive. It happens quite frequently that the partitioning program is offering to shrink the volume by a low amount only.

Some users reported that they could not shrink the partition at all even through they had lots of free Gigabytes hard drive space on the partition. This is caused by system files that are located at the end of that Windows partition. These system files are practically blocking the ability to shrink the volume of the Windows partition beyond that point. Below is an image of the shrink volume option on a Windows Vista notebook. The hard drive had more than 80 Gigabytes of free space but Vista offered to shrink that volume by less than 4 Gigabytes.

The only viable option is to run a hard drive defragmentation software that will move the files at the end of the partition to an earlier position. This is only possible before the operating system is loaded. One software that can do that is Perfect Disk. The software is not free but it can be used as a 30 days trial version which is sufficient for the purpose. This can be done by clicking on the System Files button in the disk partitioning program. This will schedule the partitioning to start before the next Windows Vista start.

There are alternatives for the commercial software like Easeus Partition Manager or gParted. I would install Windows 7 on my G: gb free but Vista would only shrink with 1 gb Windows 7 require 16 gb free.

At first the shrinkable size was only MB. I read online I would need to defragment so I did. I have tried defragmenting the hard drive with Perfect Disk 10 and the Vista Disk Defragmenter several times. However, the only amount that was freed totaled to less than 1 GB.

I tried shrinking the hard drive again, making a separate MB partition. Unfortunately, this is the largest size I amable to obtain. In addition, I've tried using DiskPart to shrink, resulting with the same problems.

Can anyone please help me out? Thank you, VaioDownstate. Thank you! Any more feedback? The more you tell us the more we can help. Can you help us improve?

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