Unable to shrink partition size

Question

I am trying to install Linux in a computer that has Windows 7. The first step was shrinking the disk size but Windows did not allow any reduction. Thus I followed a number of steps to disable "unmovable" files

I disabled the Page File
I disabled hibernation
I disabled System Protection

After that nothing seemed to have changed so I checked the disk fragmentation and it was 11% fragmented. I have since then run at least 4 defrags and I have also defragged the free space using Defraggler.

As of now the disk looks like this

Right now, Windows refuses to shrink the partition by any amount (I imagine that the files at the end of the disk are the troublesome ones).

Coming from an Linux background I am unsure what else needs to be done in order to shrink the partition.

Try gparted instead of windows to shrink. And I believe the problem is related to what windows considers unmoveable files at the end of the partition. — drescherjm, Apr 05 '17 at 22:15

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 05 '17 at 22:13

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Are you using Windows disk management tool to do the shrink? Here's a link for that method.

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

answered Apr 05 '17 at 22:13

natesrc

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Yes, I am using Windows disk management tool, however it returns 0MB of "Size of available shrink space in MB" and does not allow me to type any number. – Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz Apr 05 '17 at 22:16

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 05 '17 at 23:03

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Also make sure the recycle bin on that drive is empty.

answered Apr 05 '17 at 23:03

natesrc

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 10 '17 at 16:26

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I finally figured it out.

The easiest way is just to use a Live USB with GParted on it since that will allow you to move Windows protected files around (the windows OS is not loaded on the live distro).

If just defragmenting is concerned one can use Hiren's Boot CD and the included Defraggler for the same purpose.

answered Apr 10 '17 at 16:26

Jose Javier Gonzalez Ortiz

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Must be a new version of parted/GParted. For instance the latest "redo" live-cd includes an older version that cannot resize NTFS file systems (yet?). – E. van Putten Nov 23 '18 at 09:04

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 30 '20 at 18:59

I had the same problem on Windows 10. Turns out it was antivirus software that was running on the machine that prevented defragmentation happen properly. I actually had to temporarily uninstall antivirus. After that, the Disk Management tool was able to correctly shrink the volume.

Unable to shrink partition size

4 Answers4