calmcomputing

Often in the course of my work, I have the need to repartition drives on Windows XP systems. Typically this involves reducing the size of a large, single partition and creating a new, second partition in the free space. Partition Magic is my tool of choice because it allows the work to be done from within Windows and without data loss.

I was working with Vista RC1 this morning and discovered that the Disk Management features have been improved to offer this capability out of the box. Referred to as Shrink Volume, this command can be used to reduce the size of simple and spanned volumes. This morning I used it to reduce a single 80GB partition to 50GB and then created a new 30GB partition in the free space.

Here are the steps:

1. Open Computer Management (Start, right-click Computer, Manage) and click continue at the UAC prompt.
2. Click on Disk Management in the Storage section.
3. Right-click on a partition and Shrink Volume and will appear on the context menu.
4. After some checking, Windows will report the partitions current size, how much it can be “shrunk”, as well as the new size. You can go for the maximum “shrink” (default) or enter a smaller value.
5. When the values are set, click the Shrink button.
6. Unallocated space will appear which can be used to create a new partition.

Technorati Tags: windowsvista, vista, microsoft, beta

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