Shrink OS Volume

Well, in that case yeah. Just use PW CD Helps with a lot of headache :)

I will barge in with few more tips.

OP should not touch the first two partitions. The 39MB one and the Recovery partition (11.96GB). I remember OP saying that he wants to delete the Recovery partition later. This partiton is the Active partition and contains the boot manager for window 7 along with the bloatware he is mentioning. Once he deletes this partition he can not boot into windows 7.

It is best to not touch these two partitions ever.

When I got my new Toshiba laptop one and half months ago, It came with two similar small partitions and one big 580GB partition (C: drive) containing window 7 x64 Home premium.

I usually like to have two partitions C: for OS and D: for data. My target was to split the one single C: partition into two partitions, C: with 80 GB and D: with 500 GB.

Like OP has done, I have also tried to shrink the C: partition and the report after the analysis mentioned that I can not make C: as 80 GB but something around 417 GB or so.

As I was using My Defrag 4.3.1 in my old XP machines at both my home and office, and was well versed with the program....

I loaded My Defrag 4.3.1 into the Toshiba laptop and ran the program. This program has a graphical view of the disk layout. It also gives out the file names stored on the HDD when the mouse cursor is placed on a non empty area.

I could see that the MFT (Master File Table) occupied the space where the report says that was the maximum I could shrink.

I ran the My Defrag program with the script "System Disk Monthly" which defragged and moved all the files to the beginning of the disk including the MFT area and the Page file.

After finishing the defragment of the C: drive, I could see that all the files have been moved to the beginning of the disk, leaving a very big chunk of free space.

(See attached images)

I again tried to shrink the C: drive and this time the report says that I could shrink my C: drive to 35 GB as that was roughly the space occupied by the C: drive when it has arrived.

Using Windows 7's disk management program, I have shrunk the C: drive to 80 GB leaving the rest of the space.

As I already had 3 primary partitions (1.4 GB containing Windows Boot Manager and active, C: (80 GB) System and 14.09 GB containing the window 7 recovery files including the bloatware) I could create an extended partition with one single logical drive D: with 500 GB space.

This exercise has achieved my goals of two partitions. C: and D: from one single large C: partiton.

He could actually open the recovery partition (by assigning a letter, for example) and just delete the files not needed. It's very easy to single out the boot files. That way he can shrink that hard drive and maybe use the extra space to expand the other partition.

Well, it's actually pretty easy to just delete the whole recovery partition and use bcdboot to put the boot files in it :)

rraod said:

Is it worth taking the risk of deleting the unnecessary files to gain a small space of around 11 GB from the recovery partition compared to the space of almost 1 TB he has?

Good question.

It´s best to leave the Recovery partition until you are ready to finally let go of ever returning to the factory install, e.g. you have wisely clean reinstalled and have such a better installation that you´d never want the preinstalled factory bloatware and useless factory utilities which have much better versions built into Win7. These can throttle the best OS ever.

Even then, I´d make the Recovery Disks and keep them on file for that computer in case you ever want to sell it and put back what came on it.

There´s nothing wrong with keeping the Recovery partition although I like to have a clean uncomplicated setup and having the Recov partition marked System Active as it is now (so that the Recovery hotkey doesn´t have to do that at boot) is a layer of complication I´d want gone myself.

CBM said:

I used the Auslogics defragmenter on my laptop to see if it would move any files closer to the beginning of the disk and it did not allow me to shrink the laptop drive partition and more than before I ran it. I've been on the MyDefrag forum trying to determine if MyDefrag would move system files or the MFT closer to the beginning of the disk. I'm still reading the manual.

I did boot with the Partition Wizard disc but then decided that the interface did not give me enough input to know what I was doing. I then ejected the disc and am now trying to find a user manual online that will instruct me as to how to properly use it.

I didn´t say Auslogics could shrink the system files, but that it would label which ones are in the way, likely MFT. To my knowledge only Perfect Disk can do this if done Offline and by choosing System files, but we no longer recommend it since PW works perfectly and the CD is failsafe after thousands of operations here.

PW is intuitive but perhaps we could be more helpful: Rightclick C, select Resize, drag the right grey border to the left by as much as you want to shrink it, click OK, Apply step.
Partition Wizard Use the Bootable CD

Here are a few PW helpers. Especially the first one by our own inimitable Ted (Bare Foot Kid).

https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/93322-partition-wizard-use-bootable-cd.html
http://www.geeksdo.com/howto-resize-partition-with-partition-wizard-home-edition.html
http://www.partitionwizard.com/video-help/moveresizepartition/moveresizepartition.html