Vista’s Partition Magic

Posted on September 19th, 2007 by Anthony Clendenen.
Categories: How-To, Microsoft, Tools, Vista.

Did you know that Vista natively supports partition resizing in Windows Vista? If you go into Computer Management and navigate down to Storage, and then Disk Management in the right window pane you can select a volume, shrink that volume by right clicking on the volume and selecting Shrink Volume.

This will open a dialog box to shrink the volume where you can configure how small you would like to make it, of course it cannot shrink it past the size of the data on the drive, if you want to completely remove the partition you can simply remove it and use its available space to increase the size of another partition. In this case I only shrunk mine by 1 GB and it took just a few seconds.

After you are done shrinking the partition you can then select the other volume and right click it and select Extend volume which launches the Extend Volume wizard.

Some things to note: For a boot partition to be expanded the new space must be adjacent to it, so if I shrunk the utility partition to the left of the Recovery partition, I would not be able to use it with my boot drive, also you can only expand on a disk that is a dynamic disk.

Regards,
Anthony

Anthony Clendenen | Solutions Engineer | 1E Inc.