Shrinking a Partition

I have a 250 gb drive, currently all "C". I would like to shrink it to 80 gb (25 gb used). When I run W7 disk manager, it says I can only shrink it to 116 gb due to unmovable files. When I use resize in Partition Wizard, it seems to let me shrink to 80 gb with no issues. I have not hit "go" in either case yet, I didn't want to use PW and have it mess up my C drive. It may give me an error after I hit "go"... should I go for 80 gb, or leave it at about 120?

I have my data and images of C on another drive. Just want C smaller for imaging.

PW is pretty reliable - should be fine.

You have a backup image of the drive already , I assume.

I gave it a go with Partition Wizard. No problems shrinking it to 77 gb. I guess W7 disk manager isn't smart enough to reallocate on a reboot. Not sure what to do with the unallocated partition now. I have a 2nd 1T drive, so no real use for the extra space I just made, other than a second back up location.... doesn't hurt to have 2 or 3 back ups! At least my C-images are a lot smaller and go faster now (and will recover to a smaller drive.

Consider moving your User files into their own data partition which also acts as a vault in case the OS won't start. You just reimage the OS partition from external and your files are there waiting.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/18629-user-folders-change-default-location.html

Partition Wizard has a data protection mode which is on by default that won't allow it to fail. If it can't resize the partition, it will just boot and start over - giving you the chance to interrupt it during reboot. I'm not sure any others have this since I've had just about all of the others fail at one time or another. Disk Mgmt won't either, except with power failure which would probably fail PW, too.

I'd already done that to my second drive, all my data is on "F". I mainly wanted a smaller "C" for imaging. I now have "C", and "S" (1st drive); and "E", "F", and "P" (1T internal); and "X" (external). "S" is what I just moved off "C". I have system managed paging on "P", which seems to work well, and keeps it off my "C" images (with 6 gb ram, 6+ gb was automatically assigned to paging); also have a 500 mb fixed size pagefile on C which is probably bigger than it needs to be. I ended up with this "arrangement" after reading lots of posts here. So far, so good. Just wish I could hide "H", "I", and "J", which I never use.

To hide drives in Explorer, remove the drive letter in Disk Mgmt.

You can use the Unalloc space as a test partition to install 32 bit for performance comparison, or beta test Win8 later. You only need to delete them then to remove the Dual Boot.

Thanks guys! Removing the drive letter made them vanish! I just hadn't noticed them listed there before (since they're not at the top). Now I know which one my card is plugged into!