Windows Vista (and now Windows 7) comes with a little known yet handy feature that allows you to shrink or expand your system partitions without using 3rd party tools. This tool basically eliminates the need for tools like Partition Magic and comes in very handy for your basic hard drive resizing. Now, certain third party tools may have more bells and whistles that allow you to more than Vista’s shrink and extend features but for your run of the mill simple resizing Vista is right for the job.
Why would you need to shrink or extend a volume? Have you ever purchased a new PC and noticed that your hard drive was partitioned in ways you wish it wasn’t? Do you want to blow away that utility partition on your new computer and get back that used drive space? Or would you like to create a new partition that would allow you to enable BitLocker so you could encrypt your data? Well Vista’s Shrink feature can help you with all of those tasks and is easy to use and best of all built into Windows.
Shrinking a volume is extremely simple and takes only a few minutes. Just follow these few steps and you’ll have your partition resized in now time.
1. Open Computer Management by either right clicking My Computer and choosing “Manage” or simply typing compmgmt.msc in the Start Button search bar.
2. In the Computer Management window drill down the Storage option in the left pane and choose Disk Management.
3. Once you are in Disk Management select the partition you would like to shrink from the disk list and right-click it choosing the “Shrink” option (see image below).
4. In the popup box that appears enter the amount of space you’d like to shrink the partition by. For example, in the image below we chose to shrink by 2GB (see image below).
Note: To shrink in even gigabytes make sure you multiply by 1024MB. So if you’d like to shrink by 1GB then put 1024MB, 2GB then 2048MB, 3GB then 3072MB and so on. Also, you cannot resize to any size you want. Windows limits you based upon how much of your drive you are using (as well as the Windows install). For instance our 93GB drive only allows us to resize up to about 43GB.
5. After you shrink the partition you should see “Unallocated” space where you can create another partition by right-clicking and choosing “New Simple Volume” and then just following the steps in the wizard depending on your needs (see image below).
Extending a volume is just as easy as shrinking one. Again, there are various reasons for extending/expanding a volume, most of which will probably be because PC vendors load their new machines with bloatware.
1. To expand a volume you must make sure that the space you are expanding too is marked as “Unallocated.” To delete a partition simply right-click it and choose “Delete Volume” (see image below).
2. Once you have the desired unallocated space just right-click the partition you’d like to extend/expand and choose “Extend Volume” (see image below).
3. Once the wizard starts hit the Next button. From there you will see the Select Disks screen. From here you can select the various disks to choose which ones you’d like to extend to, for our purposes there is only one disk. Enter the amount of space (again in MB) that you’d like to expand by, in our case 2048MB which is equal to 2GB and then hit Next (see image below) and then Finish.
4. Check out your fully expanded drive and enjoy the extra space (see image below).
There you have it. A quick and easy tool for resizing partitions on the fly that is included in both Windows Vista and Windows 7. Check back later for my article on BitLocker where you may be able to put that shrinking to good use… I WAS IN THE POOL!
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