Windows 7 - need help partitioning hard drive....

can someone pls help me out...my C drive there is 382 GB of free space from a total of 452 GB and i want to shrink it to 80 GB but when i do it from computer management as shown it only is allowing me to only shrink down to 216 GB not any lesser

Welcome to SF! rome

The main reason you are running into this problem is from trying to shrink the C primary you are booting into Windows from. In order to shrink the primary down past that point you will need to Diskpart or a 3rd drive partitioning program.

The thing to look at however is the total amount of used space being reported and deduct that from the total amount of drive space available before Windows or anything was installed. A 500gb drive should report some 465gb available. If your total installation of Windows, programs, and space reserved by Windows for the paging file and restore points comes in at 60gb or less you shouldn't see any problem.

Suggest using free Partition Wizard bootable CD to Resize your partition, create new one(s) and format Logical (for data) to avoid possible future boot conflicts.

Anytime you use a partition manager besides Disk Mgmt. to shrink your partition, there is risk of failure, however PW has never failed in hundreds of Resizing operations we have helped with here.

But be sure to back up your files first anyway, as they should always be.

What is happening to you as that Win 7 has located some files at that 216 GB location which Win 7 thinks are needed (and they might well be).

When you first install Win 7 then the MFT (Master File table) gets located at a certain displacement from the start of the partition.

Now here are some tricks to help you reclaim some of that space.

1. Run a defragger.
2. Run the defragger again.
3. Now try to use the "Shrink volume" feature of DiskManagement.

To "shrink", right-click (in Disk Management display) the drive you want to shrink.

To run DiskManagement,
WIN key | type DISKMGMT.MSC | Enter key

The WIN key is the one with funny looking, wavy flag on it.

From the list of degraggers I'll include, then you will probably find DEFRAGGER from piriform to be the most straight-forward. This also free software.

If, after viewing the results of your endeavors, you still would like to shrink more, then let us know.

I've got a couple more tricks up the old sleeve which can help.

Uh OH! Just noticed that I left out the list of defraggers. Here it is:

Defraggers
Why won't some files defrag?
Defraggler
Auslogics Disk Defrag
Contig
UltraDefrag
PerfectDisk
MyDefrag
Power Defragmenter
O&O Degrag 10 Professional


I also goofed the defragger from Piriform and the defragger which I recommend for you is:
Defraggler

thanx a lot all i will try the methods y'all have suggested will definitely get back to let y'all know what was the result.......

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My favorite is Perfectdisk which does a good job of moving everything and shows a disk map so you can actually see what is preventing the partition from being shrunk. There is also a "boot time" defrag option that is necessary to move files normally locked when the Windows GUI is running. PerfectDisk is not free, but is available as fully functional trialware so it can be used to deal with the partition problem. Then you may feel you can't live without it and plunk down the $$$

i defraged the disk and it worked perfectly....thanx for the idea.....now when i am trying to make a new drive with the unallocated space at the end of naming it etc. it gives me a message
"The operation you selected will convert disk to dynamic you will not be able to start installed operating systems from any volume on the disk (except current boot volume). are you sure you want to continue"

what i wanted to do was also install Win Xp and have a duel boot...how can i do that

rome,

Would you make a snapshot of the Disk Management display and include the snapshot in your next post?

To run the Snipping Tool,
WIN key | type Snip | ENTER key

To run Disk Management,
WIN key | type DISKMGMT.MSC | ENTER key

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Since you want to install a dual boot with XP don't create the partition in Windows 7. Leave it as unallocated space. There is another important issue though. Normally to create a dual boot you install the older operating system first. Since Windows 7 is already installed if you boot the XP CD and install XP I believe you will lose the ability to boot "7". Others with more dual boot experience will need to chime in here to clarify this.