12 Web Notes

New powerful function is available in Windows Vista disk management utility. When more than one volume /partition/ exists on your hard disk, now it is possible to change its size without using third party software.

It can be used to decrese the size of one of the volumes in order to increase the size of another volume or just simply to create new volume. In both cases it is very powerful instrument. Easy to use, that makes it valuable not only for computer professionals, but also for the average computer user who has basic knowledge on how the computers work.

Just for example of when you might need this feature, consider installing Vista on C: volume of your hard disk and your working data on D: volume. Initially, there shall be plenty of free space available on C:, but after installing a few new applications its free space might decrease below the limit that you need available. I meet this problem when it was necessary to install upgrade on Windows Vista in order to solve a problem with the old firewall software. One of the possible solutions could be to move temporary some of the applications from C: to D: but this is not the best decision as when we move the files back to C:. there will be no enough free space again.

Here is how the new Vista disk management function - volume shrink / volume extend helped me to solve this problem:

Initially the hard disk of my laptop was split on two partitions, two volumes “C” and “D”. Each of them with capacity  37GB approximately. I have got approxymately 25GB free disk space on my D: disk and wanted to transfer some of the free space to disk C:.  Using the new Vista disk management function “Shrink volume” the size of disk D: has been decreased wit 20GB. when the function finished working, the hard diskwas set with three partitions: the old C: volume, the old D: volume with all data, but smaller size and 20GB free unpartitioned disk space located after disk D: partition. The oposite disk management function “Extend volume” will be able to increase the size of the volume if there is available unpartitioned space located next to the volume which size we want to extend. Hence, it was necessary to move the free space somehow and to put it betwen the two volumes C: and D:.  There is no way to do that directly, but fortunately, it is possible to achieve this result by doing an intermediate procedure.

i used the free unpartitioned disk space to create new volume and got disks C: D: and E: where E: is 20GB and empty. Then transferred all data from disk D: to disk E: - simple copy / paste. After that I have deleted the old D: disk and got free unpartitioned disk space 17 GB located right after the C: volume and before D: volume. The new E: become old D: in this step.

Next, simple right click on volume C: and then “Extend volume”.  This way I increased the size of disk C: with 17GB and decreased the size of D: volume with the same amount. So it was just moving free space between different disk volumes in three easy steps.  step (1) “Shrink volume”, step (2) create volume, copy / paste data, delete volume and step (3)”Extend partition”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.