How to Partition in Windows Vista (Extend and Shrink)?
If you are new here, Subscribe to Full Feeds or by Email or follow us in Twitter and receive free daily updates on Office and Windows Tips, Tricks and Tweaks..
With Windows Vista, there is no need of any other third party application such as Partition Magic, Disk Director or any other Partition Manager. Windows now has the inbuilt partition manager which is very easy to use.
Shrinking Windows Vista Partitions or partitioning:
This allows you to create a new partition or shrink any existing partition. Follow these steps.
Step 1: The options are available at ‘Disk Management’.
Start Menu -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Double Click Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management.
It should look like the image below.
Step 2: Now, right click the partition you want to shrink and select the shrink option.
Step 3: In the pop-up box, Enter the amount you want to shrink the partition by (By default, the maximum is entered).
Step 4: Click Shrink and That’s it! Now you have a new partition to use. You can then right click the new partition and format it the way you want it.
You will get a new partition which is listed as unallocated as above. You can use that to create a new partition (right click and format) or use it to extend with already existing partition (Read extending windows vista partitions).
In case you are not extending and saving it as a new partition then, follow these steps.
Extending Windows Vista Partitions:
This allows you to extend a partition or merge two partitions. Follow these steps.
Step 1: The options are available at ‘Disk Management’.
Start Menu -> Control Panel -> System and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools -> Double Click Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management.
Step 2: Now, right click the partition you want to extend and select the extend option.
Step 3: Click Next in the Extend Volume Wizard.
Step 4: It will list all the free space available (unallocated partition) that you can add to the particular partition that you want to extend. If you don’t have any unallocated partition, see above to check how to shrink a partition to get unallocated space.
Step 5: Select the amount of amount of space that you want to extend in by.
Step 6: Click Next and Confirm and Finish. That’s it! You have extended the partition.
Notes from my experience: Both shrinking and extending was very fast. Formatting takes couple of minutes depending on how big the volume is. I shrunk my 110GB C drive in my HP Pavilion Entertainment PC to 60GB as it doesn’t allow to shrink below that and created that unallocated space to create a new partition.
If you are facing long time delay in shrinking, then it might be because of the disk is fragmented. For example, if you have a 60GB drive and you already have 45GB of data in that. These data upon daily usage after weeks, it would have evenly spread across the whole 60GB space. Now if you try to shrink that drive to 50GB and try to get 10GB unallocated space, then disk management has to find empty space between files in the 50GB space and relocate the files from the 10GB space. This is what is usually done in defragmentation and I would suggest doing that on regular basis as it improves file reading speed.
And another of my suggestion is to use NTFS. Read on to find why NTFS is better than FAT and how to convert FAT to NTFS.
Read this post, if you want to change the drive letter in Windows Vista after partitioning.
Thanks for the tip man , i have recently started using vista …so it will be quite helpful for me .
btw I am interested in link exchange so i am adding you to my blogroll . Do add me too.
Sure Madhur. As I am using Vista myself, I will be writing more articles on Vista and Tweaks. Do check all the vista related posts.
[...] you are using Windows Vista, Learn how to Partition easily using Extend and Shrink [...]
it says i have 12mb to partition. what gives?
hey how to merge any other partition with c drive???
Hai, I tried the shrink option.It worked perfectly But ensure that you make the other partion as secondary/extended.Otherwise after restart the machine will not boot….
@Saravanan, Thanks Saravanan for the information…
Need Help in recovering disk space. I had a 120GB harddisk with Vista, with 10GB partition assigned for System Recovery purposes. I removed the Recovery Partition using a link given to me by HP however I am unable to claim the area. My C: shows disk availaility as 110 GB. How can I add the 10GB to C:?
@Raja Gopalan, I have been using HP for past three years and I know how HP is partioned….What I have faced is that when my Windows crashed, I had to reinstall the OS and I lost all my data…I suggest you to partition the C drive to at least two units and use the new drive to keep your other data. Use C drive to keep only the OS and Program Files….By this way even if windows crash you wont lose the data in other partitions…
Thanks Mr. Byte for your quick response. I appreciate.
I tried to merge/extend my partitions but the extend option is greyed?
I’ve got a problem, when I try to shrink on a 160GB hard drive in 1 partition (40 of which is occupied) it only allows me to shrink 30GB. How can I make it bigget? I’ve got 120GB free!
I would like to keep 50GB for windows vista and the rest for my stuff and I am not able to with this tool.
Thanks
I bought a new cheap laptop A135-S4656 and had vista Home Basic on it.I tried to format the HDD and created the partitions C and D. but when Itried to run the restore DVD CD it walked me through the path where there was an option of leaving the partition intact.But after it finished the installation there was no drive D.Then I went to the web to check for possibility of partitioning windows Vista your site has done it and Am very happy.I just don’t know if it will disappear the next time I run my restore DVD cd.Thanks Folks.
Newly created partition disappears,
Hello Every body
I am using HP Pavillion series of laptop 6226 tx and processor is t5200,
When ever i create a new partition, it disappears from the my computer window say if i have created a partiton and named it E, then i have C,D,E but after few days (with in a week) this newly created drive E, disappears, and i`, left with C and D.
how to resolve this issue, please help me.
Hey,
I’ve followed the instructions as above, trying to split my Acer Laptop hard disk into two partitions.
I’ve done this before a few times and had no problems, but this time when I shrank the volume, no unallocated space appeared!
I had a 160GB hard disk, and now, no matter what I do (safe mode, using other disk management software, even system restore and disk error scanners) Vista tells me the disk is a single partition of only 80GB, with no unallocated space.
What went wrong and how can I get the other half of my hard disk back?!
Vista Disk Management, dose’nt work worth a crap compared to Powerquest (now owned by Symantec). Want to split my C drive into 3 partions. Unable to do so with set up in vista.
Have to remove hard drive to computer, with XP and get the job done.
And by the reading I get on the Symantec web site, they will not be upgrading Partion Magic for use with Vista, guess they haven’t tried Vita’s Disk Management!!
Thanks Dude. Very Handy.
Thanks mate, This was very handy. I searched for agees for a partitioning tool, Theni found this! Thanks!!
hi, actually i’m quite confuse about this.. after i made the partition till step 4, i can’t format it, popup arise it’s say that i dont have enough space. beside that i have many space. please give me a details step after step 4. TQ
@caar, Using this method you can only shrink around 50% of the total disk space if there is OS in that volume. If your disk has 120 GB and has Windows in that volume, then the maximum it will allow is 60GB to partitioned seperately. If you try to partition again it wont allow…
Please help Mr. Byte, I’ve just purchased LG notebook not pre-installed. when i installed vista, there was no option to create new partetion (its inboss)so, i proceed to installation and now i have only one (1) hard drive (volume C:). how to create partition in this case, can i apply SHRINK? tnx
I tried shrink to create partition as per instruction above, i did it. tnx mr. byte
The OS partition simply DOES NOT EXTEND! I have 2 partitions c:\30gb (not enough) and d:\950gb. After shrinking my d:\ (my files) partition and having 30gb free, I realised that they could not be added to the C:\ (VISTA OS ONLY) partition.IS THERE ANY POSSIBLE SOLUTION?
@kosko, Before you extend any partition you should have free space available. In your case, partion the D drive so that you have 900GB for D drive and another 50GB free space (depending on how much you want to add to C drive). Now you can extend the C drive so that you can add up the free space.
Koool man…..thx…
My hard drive is 120GB. C partition is 20GB and other two are 50GB. I want to extend C partition as Visa itself takes 12GB and I am running out of space for C Drive.(Primary Partition) I tried your solution given in this article but when gone to Disk Management it will not show any space to extend this partition. But in my D drive I have 30GB left. How can I extend my c drive?
@Chinthaka, Before you can extend the C drive, you should shrink the D or other drive you have and make sure that free space is available so that you can use them to extend C drive…
Please help Mr. Byte, I’ve just purchased HP. Hard disk had problem. so i changed my hard disk. when i installed vista, from recovery cd, there was no option to create new partition so, i proceed to installation and now i have only one (1) hard drive (volume C:). how to create partition in this case.
Pl. help.
Thanks
Chitra
hi mr.byte,
I have 160gb harddrive. I did shrink C drive and the unallocated space is 50gb. but when I tried to make new simple volume and format it, it said that the there is not enough space available. do you have any sugestion?
thanks
I have a 500gb HDD with vista installed on it. It came from dell with a 9gb “RECOVERY” partition already created. When i try to shrink the remaining 491gb, it says the available disk space to shrink is zero, even though i have over 70gb of free space. Whats the deal? I simply want an additional 50gb partition to put my music on!
Need to extend C: Drive urgently
Hey guys, I just bought a Dell Latitude D630 laptop, and it came with Windows Vista Business and an 80GB HDD split into 2x 40GB partitions… C:\ and D:\.
I am currently interning with a company which is going to teach me advanced application development, so I had to install Visual Studio and SQL server with all service packs and updates (including Windows Vista Service Pack 1)… and now I have just under 4GB left on my c:\ drive.
When you install visual studio, it has to go into the c:\ drive (trust me), but at the moment, my D:\ is really empty, i’ve used about 40mb on it…
My question is, is it safe to delete the D:\ partition, and extend the c:\ drive to the unallocated space? I don’t want to try without an expert opinion because in the help it says that you cannot do it with a system or boot volume (both of which it is), and you cant change it to dynamic on a laptop (which I am using
Really weird problem, but would REALLY appreciate some adivce. Just the method of extending C:\ to the full 80gb would be great (if possible)! All my data gets backeed up onto server so I really dont care if windows crashes. I’d highly prefer one 80gb partition. Please help ;(!
@ Tyrone, You can definitely delete D drive and extend C to the full extent of 80GB (though you will not get exactly 80 GB, it will be littl less) as you said you dont have any OS or software installed in D drive.
@All readers,
Looks like almost everybody has the same question….The basic idea here is to make sure that you have free unallocated space before you can extend. What I mean is you have to Shrink another drive and only then you can extend using that unallocated space. Just because there is 30 GB free space in 50 GB D drive doesnt mean one can extend C drive using that 30 GB free space. This free space wont be listed when you try to extend unless D drive has already been split into 20 GB D drive and 30 GB FREE UNALLOCATED SPACE.
Anyways I’ll update the tutorial with pictures as soon as possible so that everybody can understand it better…
Hey Mr. Byte
Thanks for the super fast reply!! I was just weary of deleting d:, because I tried to shrink it and i still couldnt extend c:.. but I think i understand how it works tho, the unallocated space needs to be on a higher cluster level and immediately after; thats why it was giving me trouble if d: was in the way =)
Thanx so much tho, I deleted D and extended! i now have 47GB free on c: =)=) True expert, you are!!
Iam shrinking… its taking well over 30 minutes…is this normal?
I coudlnt wait any longer. Nothing was happening. So I closed disk manager. Nothing happened, but I lost 4 gb of space. What happened?
@Shu, It doesn’t usually take that longer, but it might take if the disk is higly fragmented. Defragmentation is usually recommended to be done on a regular basis. This might be the reason why you were facing the delay. Try defragmenting the disks and then do disk cleanup and then try again.
For those who would like to know more about defragmentation: On continous usage of the disk, the contents are stored randomly where the spaces are available in that drive but for shrinking or partitioning the drive, you need a continous space. Also defragmentation helps in easter retrieval of files.
P.S If you have never done defragmentation before or for a long time and if you are trying to do it then I would recommend doing it when you will not use the computer as it will take while to complete it.
Hi Mr. Byte. I am trying to extend my C: drive (where my OS is installed on). I have shrunk my D: partition by 10gigs, and now have 10gigs of unallocated space. I then right click on the C: drive in an attempt to extend, but the extend button is greyed out. How can I achieve this extension? Thanks!
Hello Mr Byte,
im aving a similar problem wen i try to shrink my 140 gb hard disk by 40 gigs, i have gone to shrink it but i have waited nearly an hour now and closed the disk management to see if it stoped the shrink, now if i go back into disk management it just says connecting to virtual disk service at the bottom and nothing is happening. could this be because my disk is fragmented>? how long should i wait before i can shut down my pc without loosing 40 gigs??
thanks in advance
@Lyte Byte Readers,
I have updated the article with images and more information to make it more clear.
hello all
I m using win vista ..i want to install ubuntu…i have (c:),(d:)=primary, (e:)=primary, (f:)=recovery =primary…
now wen i tried making 1 more volume out of my unallocated space…it was showing error…is it coz we cannot hav more than 4 primary partitions …plz suggest me how can i overcome this..thanks
vibhuti
@vibhuti, I dont think that is the situation. I have had 5 partitions in my 120Gb harddisk
Hi,
Your snapshot images in the article above really helped.
I am wondering if you might be willing to take one more snapshot image from Computer Management of how your drive looks now after adding the additional partition. (Your last image shows the unallocated space in black).
What drive letter did it assign the new partition which is between C: and D: in your last image?
Did the system change the drive letters (esp of your HP recovery partition which was originally D:)?
If so, did you have to rename that HP recovery partition back to D:?
Thanks for this great article.
[...] and Shrink drives to create new drives or partition it. We had already seen on the earlier tutorial how to partition in windows Vista? But sometimes after partitioning it, you may want to change the Drive [...]
@Dennis, I have updated with the screenshot you asked for. I did not change any drive letters when I partitioned my hard drive.
You may be interested in my new post on How to change drive letter in Vista.
Mr. Byte,
Thanks so much for posting the additional image from Disk Manager to see what your hard drive looked like after you were done.
Does resizing partitions work if I have a 2nd drive that has one primary partition (with just data file in it) and then an extended partition which has 2 logical dives in it?
I.E. can I shrink the first primary partition and then expand the extended partition and then expand the first logical drive which is contained in the extended partition?
Thanks so much for this great article!
Hi
I bought Dell laptop with pre installed vista with 160GB HDD
it had 3 partition C(Vista OS drive -150 GB) D(Recovery drive 10GB) and a EISA Drive (65MB). I made one more drive for installing linux of 40GB i installed it properly.but after that i can see 5 drives and now i cant shrink or extend any drive and i wanted to partition C drive of 110 GB in two parts 25GB and 85 GB. Can u please help me in this regards.
@Abhijeet, Can you explain more about the situation, Is it that you see 5 drives after you installed Linux or even before you did?
Usually Vista doesnt allow to partition the volume size below a limit. When you shrunk the Volume C, if you had shrunk to the limit it mentioned by default then it wont allow more than that. I just checked with my friends laptop who has a 150 GB C drive and it doesnt allow to reduce 105GB.
Thanks for the help. Can you tell how to merge the 2 partitions? I want to combine my “C” and my “D” drives into just one drive.
can i install another OS in the new partition?