Partition Wizard

Will it let you change the partition size?

GParted live for cd and have fun moving the D partition forward once the C primary is reduced in size! That's right! Once you shrink the C down from 200gb to 50gb you then have to move the D partition first before you can even think of expanding the E partition that may also need to be moved forward as well in order to maintain it's integrity.

The advice? It will take a little more then one step, two step routine! First you are giong to making some drastic changes to the drive's layout and will want to Back everything important up! The "Ultimate" word of caution there in case something goes sideways on you?

The best move would be to first back things up from the C and then shrink that down to where you want it. Forget about expanding E but replacing it with a brand new partition in the empty space opened up where C was! Much easier!

Was that so hard now? With the new let's say G partition your next move would be temporarily backing things up from the present D partition as you copy contents from the E over to it. Once done you dump the present afterwards you simply move the D towards the back of the drive allowing room to expand the new G out from 150gb to the desired 200gb.

Hi Huffman,

Can you post a screenshot of the PW main window?

That way we can see your partitions and understand what you want to do.

You can't change the Unallocated space before or after the partition - because there is no unallocated space.

You need to create some first. Either by adjusting the middle option for partition size - or ( easier) dragging the edge of the partition.

If Your first partition is C, second is D and third is E ( reading left to right):

1. Rt click C , select Resize/Move.

Grab hold of the RIGHT edge of the C partition and drag it 150gb to the left.

Click Ok, click Apply.

2. Rt click D , select Resize/Move

Grab the RIGHT edge and push the D partition all the way left - across the grey bit.

Click OK , click Apply

That will take a while as data has to be moved.

3. Rt click E and slect Resize/Move.

Grab the RIGHT edge and push the E partition all the way to left - over the grey bit , then drag the right edge out as far right as it will go.

Click OK, click Apply.

Again will take a few mins. as data needs to be moved.

The other thing I could add would be knowing just how drive space is free on the C primary before even making the attempt at reducing it. If you have 60gb presently on it at the moment oops! You will then have to remove things there to free up the primary before making any attempt.

One thing you won't be able to do and not while in the Disk Management tool is attempting to shrink the C primary you are running Windows from. For that you will need a 3rd party drive partitioning tool like GParted or another to avoid the problems typically when trying to resize any partition while running the OS installed on it.

While there are a few "workarounds"? for the unmovable files known to be present that's usually something left for the advanced user to test on their own. With multiple drives in use here you can see where the drives were originally split up for the 7 beta builds and later cleaned off for the RCs once XP and Vista were removed.

The original XP and Vista primaries were both shrunk down using GParted live to allow for both 32/64bit flavors of the beta builds at the time. Those later became recovery partitions when trying out the backup tools now seen in 7 and eventually new images were stored on the additional storage drives now in use.

It's not only what is on C that will make the difference. That was simply a caution when planning any resizing of partitions. You first need to know how much drive space is used. The same will apply for the D and E partitions huffman has on the drive there.

The first thing anyone will advise from the start however is making sure anything important is backed up from the drive itself especially anything unreplacable before making any large changes in case of any mishap. The advantage of having extra drives here is being able to nuke any one of the 3 OS drives soon to be only 2 at any time or if? anything crashes.