windows vista and windows 7 – shrink and expand partitions on the fly

first – even though you can use these procedures on a running, active windows vista or windows 7 operating system, if you care about your data, back it up – somewhere else – please!  critical personal data i synchronize it using windows live mesh.  now onto the tutorial and screen shots.

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my windows 7 partition (and system reserved 100 mb partition) – right click on the c: partition and choose shrink volume…

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here’s how much space i can reclaim immediately on my computer (i haven’t defragmented or anything else – just ran the shrink volume command)

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this took about 30 seconds and now it’s shrunk.

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you can only extend a volume that has free space to the right of it (so in this case i can extend the e: volume i created)

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if i had a partition for data and wanted to combine the two, i would have to free up the e: partition by moving it’s contents to a removable disk and then deleting the e: partition to extend c:

you can also use the command line utility diskpart from within windows 7 or windows vista or from windows pe to deal with repartitioning as well (this works on previous operating systems like windows xp!)

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help shrink will list the usage of the command within diskpart

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help extend will list the usage of the command within diskpart