Asus laptop. I want to reduce the size of my Windows 7 partition ('C') to around 115GB so that I can clone it to a 120GB external drive. Out of 463GB, 412GB is free space, but Disk Management is showing only 4981MB as "available shrink space". How can this be?
Use a real partition manager. Disk Management is not a real partition manager, it only pretends to be one.
In your case, you have 52GB of data spread across 470GB of disk space, with lots of intervening free space. Disk Management cannot defrag or compact that used space to span less disk space. It can only shrink to the last in-use sector.
Most real partition managers can compact in order to free up more space to shrink a partition, so use one of them.
I took your wise advice dg1261 and used a partition program successfully. Silly me to trust in Microsoft's own app...! Thanks
If you just wanted to copy rather than a true clone, plenty of programs will copy just the used sectors ( they often use the word "clone" to mean both).
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