Win Vista\7 dual boot: How do I put more GB on Win7?

Daifuku · 11 May 2010

Greetings, I come in peace.

Firstly, I apologize if there is a thread with the same topic already. I just haven't found it. Perhaps someone has a link to it then? n_n

If not, I'll go ahead and put down my questions anyway. And hopefully I'm placing it in the correct category.

So I have both Windows Vista and Windows 7 on my laptop. I have no issues at all with either, and the installation went amazingly great. Now I noticed, the amount of GB I have on the Windows 7 drive is far too little, where I have almost an empty C: Drive on Vista [I did a major de-fragmenting/clean up before adding 7]. Is there possibly a way to put more GB from the Vista drive to the Windows 7 one? Without doing any damage to Vista, of course, seeing as I still [sadly], have to use it. I did all the backups I needed for both versions, I'm just pretty clueless if or how I could split the space on each.

I use a new Dell Precision, by the way.

Basically. </3

Thanks.

Jonathan_King · 11 May 2010

Welcome to SF!

Try shrinking your Vista volume, and then extending the 7 partition:

Partition or Volume - Shrink

Partition or Volume - Shrink

It may be helpful if we could see a screenshot of your Disk Management window. Then we can give more detailed instructions.

A Preferred Method of Uploading/Posting Screen Shots

SIW2 · 11 May 2010

If your Vista volume is on the left of the 7 volume ( as seen in Disk Management) , you need to use a 3rd party partitioner.

This free one works well FREE Partition Manager Software for Windows supports all 32-bit & 64 bit Windows No-server OS.

Daifuku · 11 May 2010

Thanks for the welcome!

Created an Imageshack thumbnail. If it's okay. Tadaa~

Well, it's in the center. Lol. I may have split wrong, then. But Vista, compared to Windows 7 has quite a lot to share. Just want to make sure if it is possible to give Windows 7 a slice of the cake.

SIW2 · 11 May 2010

C is on the left of E. Therefore, your Vista volume is on the left of the win7 volume.

To add more space to E - you need a 3rd party app.

Daifuku · 11 May 2010

Awesome, thanks! Will try that. :D

OldBloke · 12 May 2010

You can only add extra space to the end of a partition, not to its start. In other words, in the diagram, the unallocated space must be on the right of the partition you want to add it to. So in most partition manager programs, you need to do it in steps.

You start with this:
[EISA] [......Vista.......] [..7..]

you shrink Vista, which makes some unallocated space after it
[EISA] [Vista] ..space.. [..7..]

you move the Win7 partition, so the space will be after it
[EISA] [Vista] [..7..] space

then you can expand the Win7 partition to include that free space
[EISA] [Vista] [......7......]

I don't think you can do it from any program running in Windows, because you are changing the system partitions. You can do that with a partition manager running from a bootable CD, such as gparted.