The release of Windows Vista will bring a number of welcome enhancements to the built-in set of system tools, including the ability to dynamically resize partitions. Prior to Windows Vista, the ability to shrink and extend disk volumes has only been available through third party tools such as Partition Magic.
Although not as full featured as some third party partition management applications, Windows Disk Management console will allow users to shrink, extend, create, and format partitions. The new resizing features will allow users to shrink a single partition with unused space, and then create a new partition in the resulting free space, as well as extending a current partition if there is available free space after it.
To access Disk Management, right click on My Computer, and select Manage from the context menu – this will open the Computer Management console (alternatively, Disk Management may be accessed from Control Panel> Administrative Tools> Computer Management).
From the Computer Management console, click on Disk Management which is located under the Storage section in the left hand pane. To shrink a current volume, locate the partition to be resized from the Disk Manager, right click on it, and from the context menu select Shrink Volume.
A Shrink dialog box will open from which you can enter the amount of space in MB to shrink the partition. This dialog box will also show the current size of the partition, the size of available shrink space available, and the total size after shrinking. Once you have selected the amount of space to shrink the partition by, click on the Shrink button.*Note: the size of the available shrink space can be restricted due to page files, restore files, and hibernation files.
Once the Shrink operation has completed, you will now have the selected amount of unallocated free space available immediately following the shrunken partition.
To extend a current volume, locate the partition to be resized from the Disk Manager, right click on it, and from the context menu select Extend Volume. The Extend Volume Wizard will then open, click Next. You will then be given a dialog box to select the disks to extend. Select the amount of space in MB to extend the volume, and click next. The selected partition will then be extended by the amount of MB selected. *Note: If the partition you want to extend is a boot or system, or cannot be converted to dynamic, you will only be able to extend the volume to the immediately adjacent free space.
Once volumes have been resized, a new partition can be created and formatted in any unallocated free space by right clicking on the unallocated space in the Disk Manager, selecting the type of volume to create, and completing the New Volume Wizard.
With the new enhancements to Windows Vista Disk Management, shrinking and extending partitions is now easily accomplished. As always, when making changing to the partition structure, users should ensure that all important files and data are backed up.
