Shrinking C Drive Partition: How much can I shrink it?

Hi all,

I'm trying to shrink my C partition so I can dual boot with Xubuntu. I attempted to do so using Disk Management, however, it only would allow me to shrink 556 MB which is obviously very little space.



Admittedly my hard drive is quite small but I have 47GB free and am only looking to use about 20GB of this max for Xubuntu.

I understand that I need to use 3rd party software to get around the limits of the unmovable files. This is where I get a bit nervous. I downloaded AOMEI and it allows me to shrink the disk down to whatever I want. Is there a limit to how much I should shrink my disk, beyond the obvious 50 odd GB I have in use?



I have already created a USB bootable recovery partition using the Windows utility so worst case scenario I can do a factory reset.

Basically I am just looking for a little reassurance that shrinking the C drive down to about 80GB will allows Windows to operate (it will still be my primary OS) and that I am proceeding correctly.

you have 57GB used out of 103..

If you have created the recovery drive via Control panel - recovery - create a recovery drive..
You can delete the two partitions after C and shrink C by 5GB to get a 20GB partition

or you can just shrink C by 20GB

BUT. you should make a full system image first as a second recovery option - by using something like Aomei Backupper or Macrium

KYHI said:

BUT. you should make a full system image first as a second recovery option - by using something like Aomei Backupper or Macrium

Click to expand...

Thanks for the quick reply!

Question in using Macrium: I looked into this and the image is much much larger than my USB can accommodate. I have an external hard drive I use for my personal file backup. Can I use this to create the recovery image or does it need to be an empty drive?

you could save the backup image to the ext HDD

You do not want to use the extHDD as you bootable Marcruim drive (boot disk)

Check out recovery tools iso in sig below

Pardon my never ending questions:

Downloaded and the ISO but I don't understand exactly what is to be done with it? Is it a recovery image?

Burn ISO to cd/dvd or mount iso (double click) and copy files to usb - then boot from usb or cd/dvd

It has the two programs you need - partition assistant and macrium - plus some..

Ok I followed those steps and booted from the USB drive. I'm not seeing how this is different from what I was doing on Windows. Or is this my boot disk now?

If I create an image file in Macrium with my external as the destination folder as such:


Is this all I need to do?

Then in the case of needing to recover, I boot from the USB and choose the recovery image file in Macrium from where I've saved it on my external?

Just want to make sure I am following here.

your dsik selection is correct

if F is your extHDD - click next

And YES, that boot disk is with windows GUI.. You are actually booted into ram (memory) and thus free to work on the disks.

After you create the system image - you can use aomei to re-partition that drive..