How to shrink volume in windows 7?

Tuesday 30 October 2012

How to shrink volume in windows 7?

Microsoft Windows 7 provides several tools for managing the configuration of your computer and the various parts of your operating system.For managing partitions and volumes the Windows 7 Disk Management tool provides a simple interface to do it.In this post I will show you an easy way to shrink a volume to free up space so you can create a new partition on your disk.

1.Click on Windows start button.Type diskmgmt.msc in a search box.See Figure 1.

Figure 1

2.Now Click diskmgmt option on the left panel. It will load disk configuration information.Your Disk Management Tool will look something like figure 2.

Figure 2

All the information of partitions in your computer will be displayed on the right hand side.See figure 3.

Figure 3

3.Now,In Disk Management, right-click the volume that you want to shrink, and then click Shrink Volume.See Figure 4.

Figure 4

4. In the field provided in the Shrink dialog box, enter the amount of space by which to shrink the disk and click shrink.See Figure 5.

Figure 5

Note:- You can only shrink a partition if it has enough vacant space. And you should always make sure that a partition has some space to accommodate more data. Shrinking 5GB of space means new size of partition will be 5GB less than previous size.

When the process is complete, you will have a new unallocated partition.See Figure 5.

Figure 5

The next step will be to allocate the newly created space into something the operating system can use.You can use that space to create new partition.For a tip on creating a new partition,visit How to create Partition in windows 7? post.

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