Use Windows Vista built-in Disk Management to resize Partition

More and more users switch to Windows Vista Operating System now for its good performance, such as resize partition.

As you know, the Disk Management console tool in Windows XP will allow you to create a new partition using any unallocated, or free, space on a hard disk. However, if there is a single partition that takes up the entire hard disk, you can't use the Disk Management console tool to reconfigure it. Of course you can back up the disk, reboot with a DOS startup disk, and then use DOS Fdisk command to resize the disk, but then you'll have to reformat and reinstall, which is a lot of work.

What about to resize Vista's Partition? Fortunately, Windows Vista's Disk Management console tool will allow you to resize your partitions on hard disk any way you want. In other words, it will now allow you to shrink, extend, create, and format partitions without putting your data in jeopardy. Of course, before you perform any of these operations, you should back up, just in case.

How to resize your partitions on Windows Vista?

As you can see in Figure A, this example 80-GB hard disk is currently configured as a single partition. To divide it into two partitions, right-click on the dark blue bar and select the Shrink Volume command, as shown in Figure B.

When you do, the Disk Management console tool will check to see if there is enough free space on the disk to create a new partition. As if does so, you'll see the Querying Shrink Space dialog box, as shown in Figure C.

As soon as the Disk Management console tool verifies that there is indeed enough free space on the disk to create a new partition, you'll see the Shrink dialog box, shown in Figure D. As you can see, the value in the Total Size Before Shrink box indicates the current size of the partition and the value in the Size of Available Shrink Space indicates the maximum size that you can allocate to the second partition.

Disadvantage: when you resize your partition on Windows Vista. It only supports NTFS file system, the shrink performance slow and also lacks some advanced functions, including move, hide your partition and make a partition scheme. In my opinion, the largest inconvenience is that you cannot use a graphic interface to move/resize a partition by dragging. If it can do that, more computer beginners will be attracted.

For better data security, our free backup software - EASEUS Todo Backup will help you a lot. It provides easy-to-use interface to backup and restore your system, disk and partition in a few minutes.

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