did you know: dynamically shrinking a hard drive partition

i’ve been running windows vista for over 3 1/2 years now (before it was even released publicly) and windows 7 for almost a year.  most of the it professionals, consultants and trainers i speak to feel pretty comfortable and knowledgeable with microsoft operating systems and many have also begun testing windows 7, but almost no one is aware of something i’ve been using for the past 3 1/2 years – dynamically shrinking a hard drive partition.

screen shot of windows 7 release candidate – shrinking a partition

this is my production computer that i’m typing this post on – and i’m going to shrink the c drive without a reboot required.

here’s that same hard drive – only with a smaller c partition and 21 gb free

next posting we’ll talk about how to do this to support dual boot scenarios!