How to add more space to my Vista partition

[ingeborgdot]

I am running vista 64 and want to add more space to my os partition. I have my hdd partitioned to dual boot XP(which I don't really use anymore) and Vista Ultimate 64 bit. I then have documents etc on the other partition with about another 400GB of space left. I have had to add some more things to my vista os and with sp1 and sp2 coming out shortly I would like to add some more of my unused space to it. What programs do people use for vista on this? Thanks.

[dengyong]

The tool you need is built into vista.
start/rt click computer/manage/disk management/rt click the disk you want to make changes to.
The rest is self explanatory.

[ingeborgdot]

I understand but it won't let me extend the os partition. It will let me shrink but not extend.

[LIQUIDHERION]

exactly....google search brought me to this Shrink feature.....Not sure why I would ever want to shrink a partition......

Partition magic doesn't work with my copy of vista so I'm looking into acronis program which is supposed to be compatable.

As far as I can tell...the answer is a 3rdparty app.

My desktop vista ultimate is 20 gigs and full...

[Monkey101]

Move the virtual memory and clean hibernation files ie. disk cleanup (thats the problem i had)

But a simple solution would be nice, my Vista Ultimate partition is also 20gb and only about 2gb free.

[LIQUIDHERION]

The Hdd My o/s is on is a 300gb
Its defraged on schedule.


Its
20 g O/S
the rest Storage

I Shrunk the storage by 5 gigs, hoping I could Extend the 5 gigs to the O/S partition....no dice. I could however extend it back into the storage partition.

I then tried Acronis, used feature "free up hdd space" everything seemed ok, added 10 gigs to the O/S drive to make 30 gigs total.
Next step is to reboot and after the bios comes the blue screen of death. 1 hard restart later the Acronis prog kicks in after the bios and windows scroll bar thing.

It goes through the motions of doing the Texas 2 step for me. Then I get sent to the desktop. I then Click on computer to see that nothing at all has changed. Still a 20 gig O/S drive.

I do the hard drive clean to remove 500mb of junk and reduce the virtual memory from 2.5 gig to 1 gig.

I now have 4 gigs free of 20 gigs. I'm not going to risk any more partitioning. I don't want to cripple/lose the setup on this drive.

Waiting for one of those fancy new solid state vector HDD to make an O/S off of but need the prices to come down to earth before tying the knot.

[zanzabar]

MS says 60GB is the minimum recommended for windows. but to save alot of space copy the windows\winsxs to anouther drive its probly about 10GB

[LIQUIDHERION]

*gulp* 60 gigs for an O/S? I never got the memo.

I wouldn't want my O/S drive to be that big. This reminds me of Cartman's trapper keeper on South Park that kept growing until the entire world was a Trapper keeper.

Nty.

[C-N]

I am running vista 64 and want to add more space to my os partition.

Older Partition Magic 8 for example had the option to be run from floppy's so its not OS specific maybe this would be worth a go.

[zanzabar]

*gulp* 60 gigs for an O/S? I never got the memo.

I wouldn't want my O/S drive to be that big. This reminds me of Cartman's trapper keeper on South Park that kept growing until the entire world was a Trapper keeper.

Nty.

with vista u are supposed to run your main applications from the c drive and vista has a bunch of windows installer files with the OS that need more space, but go to c:\windows and look at the winsxs folder and see how big it is i had a launch install of vista that was over 20GB in about a year and a half, and my week old server08 install is 6GB. that folder has copys of dll files for app computability and it never removes files and u can break windows by deleting them

here is the tutorial http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=19235

[LIQUIDHERION]

I remember reading about how vista works , in that everything you do is saved and it doesn't erase previous dll's incase you were ever to need them again.

It had something to do with communicating the o/s with apps regardless of how you up/down graded them or something.


After defraging the o/s drive I'm left with just under 5 gigs free. I may lower my virtual mem to 500mb since I never max out my on-board 2gigs anyways.


Moving the windows folder to the storage drive. Will Vista be able to communicate with it, will it know where it is?


Seems O-O software is the program to resize the partition as it is vista compatible. I used it briefly back in the day but forgot about it.

[ewitte]

Everyone is always too lazy to not just do it the clean way and format/re-install. I've installed windows 7 like 10 times in the last month testing different RAID stripes for the best performance.

[ingeborgdot]

It would take me over 12 hours just to reinstall all of my programs. If you have the time great. I guess I just have more programs than you.

[gillll]

hiren's boot cd.

the answer for your problems.

latest is 9.7

[ingeborgdot]

I have found a way to do it.
1. Defrag the E drive - Vista's defrag will be very slow - d/l the free Auslogics program and use that - it could still take awhile depending how badly fragmented it is.
2. In Disk Manangement, right click the E drive and select Shrink - this will tell you how much you can shrink it by.

If you are lucky, it will be 230gb or more. Shrink it by the max it allows. You now have unallocated space of that size ( black bar across the top ).

3. Right click the new unallocated space and select New simple Volume , it will suggest a drive letter ( probably H which will be fine ) also select Quick Format.

When the format is finished, Restart the pc. You now have another partition ( it will be green in Disk Management, which means an extended partition - don't worry about that , it's fine for storing data )

4. In Explorer ( not disk management ) copy the entire contents of the E drive to the new drive, H. That will take a while. Check it has all copied across to your satisfaction.

5. You can now go into Disk Management, right click the E drive and select Delete. This will now be unallocated space.

6. Right click the C drive and select extend to incorporate all that unallocated space into a much larger C drive.

You can use the extend partition option in vista. The only thing is if u want to icrease the os partition u should delete all the other partition except the os partition.

Step1- back up data in all other partitions using externel hard disk(or u can copy those files in to your os partition also).
Step2- delete all other partitions,
Step3- extend the os partition using extend partition option,
Step4- create partitions and restore your data.


There is another way to do it.

Use a bootable partition manager - either Linux Gparted, or the Dos one Echrada posted earlier may be simpler -( make sure your mouse is installed in a ps/2 port as some don't support usb mouse connections ).

It gives a window somewhat similar to Disk Management.

You then grab hold of the left edge of the partition you want to shrink, and drag it 50gb to the right. Press Apply or Next, and wait ( a long time, an hour at least )- it will move that 100gb of music data 50gb across to the right.

You will then have that 50gb unallocated space between the C drive and the smaller E drive.

Then use Vista Disk Management to extend the C partition to incorporate the 50gb unallocated space.