Tip #4156 - Resize Your Vista Partitions
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Resize
Your Vista Partitions
Prior to Windows Vista,
the ability to shrink and extend disk volumes has only been available
through third party tools, such as Partition Magic. Although it's not
as full-featured as some third party partition management applications,
the Windows Disk Management console allows you to shrink, extend, create
and format your hard drive partitions. The new resizing features also
enable you to shrink a single partition with unused space and then create
a new partition in the resulting free space. Along with all of that, it
also allows you to extend a current partition if there is enough available
free space after everything else is done. Sounds nice, huh?!
To access the Windows
Disk Management console, right click the Computer icon
on your desktop and select Manage from the context menu.
That will then open the Computer Management console (alternatively, it
may also be accessed from Start, Control Panel,
Administrative Tools, Computer Management).
From the Computer
Management window, click on Disk Management, which is
located under the Storage section in the left hand pane.
To shrink a current volume, locate the partition you want to resize from
the Disk Manager, right click on it and then from the context menu, select
Shrink Volume.
A Shrink dialogue
box will then open. From there, you can enter the amount of space, in
MB, that you want to shrink the partition down to. This dialogue box will
also show the current size of the partition, the size of available shrink
space available and the total size after shrinking. Once you have selected
the amount of space to shrink the partition by, click on the Shrink
button.
Note:
The size of the available shrink space can be restricted due to page files,
restore files and hibernation files.
Once the Shrink operation
has completed, you will immediately have the selected amount of unallocated
free space available to you.
Now, to extend a current
volume, locate the partition you want to resize from the Disk Manager,
right click on it and then from the context menu, select Extend
Volume. The Extend Volume Wizard will then open. Click Next
to get started. You will then be given a dialogue box you can
use to select the disks you want to extend. Select the amount of space,
in MB, to extend the volume and then click Next. The
selected partition will then be extended by the amount of MB you have
chosen.
Note:
If the partition you want to extend is a boot, a system or if it cannot
be converted to dynamics, you will only be able to extend the volume to
the immediately adjacent free space.
Once the volumes have
been resized, a new partition can be created and formatted in any unallocated
free space. All you have to do is right click on the unallocated space
in the Disk Manager, select the type of volume you want to create and
then complete the New Volume Wizard.
With the new enhancements
made to the Windows Vista Disk Management console, shrinking and extending
partitions is now easily accomplished. As always, when making changes
to your partition structures, you should always ensure that all of your
important files and data are backed up.
Happy partitioning!
~ Ramachandran Kumaraswami
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