solved Shrink C: in Windows 7

mac29

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Dec 19, 2008
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Need to shrink a Windows 7 C: (one 300GB drive, no other partitions) down to a size I can clone to another drive. Have been using Clonezilla and Gparted so please hold off on any other suggestions. The consensus seems to be that yes, 7's Disk Management can shrink an active, basic drive's size, ex. Bluedrago505 on 3-1-12. However I need to be aware of turn off the paging file and hibernation needing space as well.

Q: If I follow the steps for paging file is Disk Management definitively safe to shrink my C:? Is Gparted safe to do so? After backing up the data of course.

Then I can right-click on the unallocated space and select 'new simple volume', format to ntfs and use the new partition, right?

Been surfing on this for hours so I may be a little bleary. I have 80 GB's used and believe I need to change 'alot of' the 220GB (or what's left after the bumpers Windows uses lately) to unallocated space, after finding a size Windows likes. Trying to use a 120GB partition on another drive to store a clone - not an image - of the 80GB 7 Premium and my data. Bought this system used so it's all one big chunk.

Additionally, I believe Clonezilla will copy only used sectors/bytes so my 80GB should fit anyway. But not sure because there is no choice disk to partition, only partition to partition. I could try that but using this for the initial backup makes me want to verify that others haven't had glitches; I'm only using beginner mode and am just getting used to these 3rd party util's.

Lastly, if I can use Gparted as securely as my old ver of Partition Magic I can finally backup everything multiple ways. Thanks for any insight!
 

Rusting In Peace

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Jul 2, 2009
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I've never attempted what you are trying and this is totally not answering your question but I thought I'd point you in the direction of a good analysis tool to help you reduce the size of your install.

If you install WinDirStat you'll be able to see where all the space on your hard drive is spent - including the hibernation and page files. This makes it pretty easy to find things to delete.