Shrink Volume Problem in Vista
April 18, 2009 by Milo Riano
Filed under Computers
Did you every try to use the Shrink Volume feature of Windows Vista? Did it ever tell you that you didn’t have space left despite having more than 10GB of free disk?
The problem isn’t the amount of disk space you have but the arrangement of the file system. It is most likely that the end of your disk volume is occupied with an immovable data.
How to solve this?
1. Disable System Restore
2. Disable Pagefile
3. Disable Kernel Memory Dump
4. Disable Hibernation
5. Run a cleanup utility, my favorite is CCleaner.
6. Run disk defrag which would make sure the end of the file system is cleared
7. Go ahead and shrink your disk
I gave up on Vista’s shrink because of this restriction. Rather than go through all your recommended steps, I have used the free Easeus Partition Manager on several machines. It’s fast and easy and shrinks partitions Vista won’t. peace, mjh