Hi all, this is my first post, and I come begging for help. I am running Windows 7 Ultimate dual boot with Windows Vista. Vista is installed on my C: drive and Windows 7 is installed on my K: drive. What I am trying to do is very gradually reduce the size of my C: drive where Vista is installed whilst increase the size of my K: drive where windows 7 is installed. I have followed the instructions of how to shrink and extend a drive but with my installation it does not seem to be able to extend my K: drive, but it can extend my C: drive. Here it shows the allocations Here it shows the options when I right click on my C: drive Here it shows the options when I right click on my K: drive http://i54.tinypic.com/2rzbcr5.png Here it shows the options when I right click on the unallocated space http://i53.tinypic.com/imunf5.png And heres the detailed part http://i54.tinypic.com/24444f4.png Could anyone offer advice on how I can extend my K: drive to use the unallocated space, without destroying the C: partition. I am looking to very slowly phase out my use of Vista, hence the reason why I am wanting to reduce its allocated space. I do not want to reinstall my OS to make it a single partition. (I'm actually beginning to confuse myself so I will open the floor at this point.) Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Windows disk manager doesn't move data on the disk. Assuming "*" are data blocks. and [.......] represent the partition, where "." are empty space. If you have something like this: [*..............................................*] Where you date data block on each extremes of the partition, you won't be able to shrink it. You need a much more powerful disk management tool, and be outside of Windows, to do this task. Why not just format and remove Vista? You gain nothing from it, especially that Win7 is better, but beside that.. it's the same OS kernel.
This question came to mind for me too. Windows Disk Management can't do operations as complex as you're asking, presumably because Microsoft either didn't feel it was necessary to include such functions, or they felt that the risk of data loss was too high to expose that functionality to the user. What you want is something like GParted. You burn it to an optical disc (or bootable USB drive) and then reboot your system into the GParted interface. From there you can modify your partitions in a friendly graphical interface with a lot more flexibility and power than Windows' own tools offer. Beware that operations such as moving partitions are risky, in that if you have a power failure, crash or similar glitch you could lose all of the data on the drive, not just the partition that you're working on; since it's the partition table that is being modified as well as the 'physical' data being moved chunk-by-chunk to a new location. If the process gets interrupted then the partition table can get corrupted, or the raw data on the drive can end up split between locations on the drive without the updated partition table to point the filesystem at the data. The reason GoodBytes and I bring up 'moving' partitions when you asked about extending your K volume back into the empty space is that partitions always have to grow from left to the right, so to speak. You can't extend them backwards, so you have to use a tool such as GParted to move the partition back to the start of that unused space, then extend the other end of the partition back out to the end of the drive. GParted makes those kind of operations very simple to do, but there is still a risk of data loss if anything goes wrong along the way. I've lost a partition doing this and had to manually recover my data through a combination of backups and a tool that can read raw data from a drive with a broken partition table. If you can back up all of the data on the drive, then go right ahead; You've nothing to lose. If you don't have backups, make sure there's minimal risk of power failure etc during the operations.
I THINK but can be told otherwise if someone else knows better (definitely haha) that to extend the volume the free space must be after that partition. So thats why you can extend your vista drive but not your 7 drive. Get rid of vista in my opinion, 7 can do everything vista can, and better, with more functionality and compatibility. Dump vista and just have 7
+1 for Gparted. An Ubuntu LiveCD should include it. However, if you are intending to phase out Vista entirely, really consider just installing Win 7 at the start of the drive. If you go the route of deleting the Vista partition, you could end up with bootloader issues to fix, which can be very frustrating.
the shrink, least from what I've seen you need to turn off system restore.. remove the page file then restart- defrag the partition and then shrink/expand then turn the restore/page file back on.. hope it helps
This only MAY help. Another thing si to start deleting files like no tomorrow, in the hope that the file you delete are the edge of the partition, so that you can shrink it. In my case, it's XP mode virtual disk. So doing what you said, would be useless in my case.
