Shrinking Windows volume

[Guest]

Hi there,

I currently have a C: (Windows Vista) drive with about 100 Gb total space,
while not even 20 Gb is being used. I want to shrink it to about 30-35 Gb
(just to be on the safe side) so I can make a backup of my Windows drive more
easily. Disk management however only lets me shrink it with about 40 Gb,
leaving a 60 Gb C: drive. Hmmm. Now I've already done some searching and
found out that this is because Windows seems to bump into unmovable files at
that point. So, I moved the pagefile to another drive and deleted all shadow
copies (system restore points) as suggested in those sources. Still, no
improvement. So I'm quite at a loss now.

Any working ideas, suggestions, or questions regarding more info about my
system are greatly appreciated! In advance, thanks for your time.

 

[Guest]

A new problem arose. I decided to shrink my 100 Gb C: drive by 40 Gb so that
I could already make a start with a new Programs drive, and I planned to
extend that one later when my first (see above) problem would hopefully be
solved. As I tried to make a new drive out of 40 Gb unallocated disk space
though, I got the following error:

There is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this operation.

But I don't get it... I'm just allocating space to a new disk, am I not?
Someone please explain this and provide a solution. Thanks in advance (again).

 

[...winston]

Robin,
Your before and after the attempted 'shrink' is still due to Windows
unmovable files. The only safe way around it in lieu of a complete
reinstall is to use a compatible Vista third party application(e.g.
Acronis Disk Director) which can facilitate your 'shrink' requirements.

...winston
MS-MVP Windows Live Mail

 

[Guest]

Winston,

Just one more question before I try that. Will Acronis Disk Director move
the files ´blocking´ the shrinking or will they overwrite it? ´Cause I
already tried the boot-cd of GParted, but I don´t think that if I shrink my
C: drive with that those files will last... But if you can ascertain me that
the Acronis program is safe, I´d try that immediatly. Oh and the second
problem of not being able to allocate available space has been solved (thanks
to that boot-cd of GParted; it came to me that I couldn´t create more than
four primary partitions on a disk, so I made an extended bigger one and
divided that in two volumes).

Anyway, thanks for your time to reply.

Robin