did you know: you can shrink a hard drive from the command line (and in the windows vista/7 setup program?)

friday i posted information about dynamically shrinking a partition from your windows vista or windows 7 installation (making room for another operating system) but what if you are already running windows xp and would like to take advantage of this feature?  you can, but before the step by step a disclaimer:  back up your critical data first. if you care about it, make sure it’s on a separate computer, hard drive drive, dvd or my favorite - windows home server.

now onto the how to stuff.  first you’ll need a windows 7 release candidate (32 or 64 bit – my preference is 64 bit) and you’ll need to start your computer from the dvd.  after the very first screen (where you choose install windows 7), press shift + f10 and this should display a command prompt

type the following commands:

diskpart

select disk 0

select part 1

shrink querymax

image

this is the same system that i shrunk on friday, so the reclaimable space is not very large.  you can see the commands and the outputs.

help shrink gives you the additional syntax for the command.