Unable to partition hard drive?

dulpit

Hey, I want to partition up my hard drive a bit on Windows 7. Currently i have ~300GB of total space on the drive, of which 210 is free. When i go to computer management to shrink the drive however, it tells me that the most i can shrink by is 187MB... Which is annoying...

It does mention that you can't shrink a volume past a point where "unmovable files" are located, and suggests i defragment my drive. I did this earlier tonight, came home & tried to shrink volume again, but no luck...

Any ideas?

StopNotWorking

You'll need partitioning software to do that. I've never seen someone manage to partition/format/shrink a partition enough to get an OS on it natively in windows.

Be careful what software you use aswell. A compatability error with windows 7 in something as dangerous partitioning could lead to some big problems.

Capt'n Midnight

turn off swap files and hibernation files
delete any temporary files
scandisk
defrag and try again

dulpit

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

turn off swap files and hibernation files
delete any temporary files
scandisk
defrag and try again

Alas this didn't work...

x in the city

use ACRONIS suite

you boot up from it and it lets you tinker around with everything.

ethernet

Wouldn't feel right trying to resize a mounted partition.

Download a free utility such as GParted and burn it to CD. It will resize NTFS partitions. Backup first. Things can occasionally go wrong so it's best to be safe.

If you don't mind spending a few beans, I too would recommend Acronis Disk Director.

EKRIUQ

I've a similar set up to the op and here's what I did

I just used Vista's partitioning application.

To resize a partition with Windows Vista, follow these steps:

Be sure to back up any valuable information, because there is a slight chance that data can be lost when dealing with partitions.

1) Click on the Start menu

2) Right click on Computer and click on Manage



3) You may get a User Account Control dialog here; just click Continue

4) In the left pane, open up the Storage category and click on Disk Management



5) Here, you will find your partitions for your disks. Right click on the partition you’d like to modify.


6) Click on Extend Volume or Shrink Volume to extend or shrink the selected partition.

It might take a while, and then format your new partition and then install your Windows 7. Worked fine for me
__________________

dulpit

ethernet wrote: »

Download a free utility such as GParted and burn it to CD. It will resize NTFS partitions. Backup first. Things can occasionally go wrong so it's best to be safe.

Used this, worked a treat... Cheers...


Oh and @ EKRIUQ - those steps were what i had been doing all along...