Solved shrink C drive

Hi everyone,

I've had a look around both here in 8Forums and general Googling, but what I've found is unclear and contradictory.

I have a new HP Pavilion 15 e073sa laptop with a 750Gb HD. I would like to mimic my Win7HP setup on my old Toshiba laptop which is to partition the C drive to around 150Gb and have the rest as a data partition. (Currently my new HP's C drive has only 30Gb used).

Looking at Windows' inbuilt shrink volume tool, it will only let me shrink the HP C drive to half the size (around 348Gb) due to immovable system files. This tool has a note to see the defragmentation report for more details though I can't discover more...

So: Using inbuilt Windows tool, can I shrink my C drive, then shrink the shrunken C drive again (and again?) to achieve my desired 150Gb C drive? (and of course then consolidate the resulting empty spaces into one partition)

Or is it better to go for a 3rd party software solution? I have emailed the support team at Minitool Partition Wizard and they tell me there is no difference between installing their program onto my C Drive to manipulate it, and using a bootable CD to resize and partition my drive, - thought they say that the change will be irreversible??.

Can someone please shed some light on this for me?

Many thanks.. :thumb:
D

allend66 said:

So: Using inbuilt Windows tool, can I shrink my C drive, then shrink the shrunken C drive again (and again?) to achieve my desired 150Gb C drive? (and of course then consolidate the resulting empty spaces into one partition)

Click to expand...

No - that doesn't seem to work for me at least. I can't shrink mine to less that 128GB even though I have another 52GB free. As I'm wanting to do the same thing I'll try the mini partition wizard and see what happens and will update this in a couple of minutes....

ok thanks... and good luck!

Well.. I took a little longer. I downloaded minipartition wizard and resized to 80GB. When you click apply changes it reboots to make the changes which took about 15 minutes. This must be why they say it is the same as using a boot CD as the changes are still made before loading windows. It worked fine for me - probably an idea to make a backup first.

I've no idea about the irreversible comment. I can easily extend C: using the disk utility although if the next partition was used I'd have to move it using the partition wizard.

Seems a good tool and to answer your question it seems you do need to use it (or something else similar)

OK, thanks, good job.

So to confirm, you used the installed program (exe) not the (iso)?, though as you say it shouldn't make a difference.

Thank you.
D

adamf said:

Well.. I took a little longer. I downloaded minipartition wizard and resized to 80GB. When you click apply changes it reboots to make the changes which took about 15 minutes. This must be why they say it is the same as using a boot CD as the changes are still made before loading windows. It worked fine for me - probably an idea to make a backup first.

I've no idea about the irreversible comment. I can easily extend C: using the disk utility although if the next partition was used I'd have to move it using the partition wizard.

Seems a good tool and to answer your question it seems you do need to use it (or something else similar)

Click to expand...

I agree it is a great disk tool. I personly like it as I used partition Magic since forever and this program GUI and they way it works is quite familur. its a pity that Norton didn't keep Partition Magic up to date. MiniTool has made a great replacement

allend66 said:

OK, thanks, good job.

So to confirm, you used the installed program (exe) not the (iso)?, though as you say it shouldn't make a difference.

Thank you.
D

Click to expand...

No problem - I was planning on doing it anyway so it was a good excuse. I downloaded the .exe, yes. Not the ISO. Version 8.1.1 from here MiniTool Free Partition Manager