Are you wondering how to resize partitions in Vista without losing any data and without using 3rd party software?
To resize a partition with Windows Vista, follow these steps:
There is a slight chance that data can be lost when dealing with partitions: Be sure to back up any valuable information.
- Click on the Start menu
- Right click on Computer and click on Manage
- You may get a boring UAC (User Account Control) dialog here; just click Continue
- In the left pane, open up the Storage category and click on Disk Management
Here, you will find all your partitions for your hard disks. Right click on the partition you would like to modify.
Click on Extend Volume or Shrink Volume to extend or shrink the selected partition
There have been a lot of complaints and confusion as to why Windows Vista grays out the extend volume and shrink volume properties. If this doesn’t work for you because some options were greyed out, you can follow this other method.
Before continuing, make sure that you backed up all important files and that you are not using diskpart.exe with Dynamic Disks
Start Menu and type diskpart.exe this will open a command-prompt like window. At this window, type list disk. This will list all your available hard disks.
Proceed by typing select disk <disk number> to select the disk you want to work with. To understand which number is associated the volume we want to work with type list volume
Select the desired volume by typing: select volume <number> or select partition <number>
You then have a list of commands you can type in depending on what you want to do with your selected volume:
Shrink desired=20000 minimum=5000 will shrink the volume by 20GB. If that’s not possible, this command makes sure that you at least shrink the volume by 5GB
Extend size=10000 will extend partition by 10GB
You can change values as you want but remember that the greatest amount possible when shrinking is your partition's free space available and the unpartitioned/unused disk space when trying to extend a partition.
You can obtain more information about DiskPart at this page. XP users may use the method number 2 downloading diskpart from here.
