Shrink C Drive problems

Here is my issue, I am running vista 64bit and i went into disk management to shrink my C drive. However when I went to shrink it it said i could only shrink 336MB out of my 291GB. It said space was limited because snapshots or pagefiles were enabled in the volume. My question is what are they and how do I turn them off?

 

Windows Vista has a reputation to not allow the user to shrink his C:\ drive much. Even I without pagefiles and with a x86 system couldn't shrink it more than 200GB which is a problem to me, because I have a 320 gig HDD. In this case I should recommend you running a partitioner. Same as what the disk managment does, except that it doesn't limit you in doing so. I partitioned my HDD with Hiren's Boot CD's Partition Magic. I'm pretty sure there is some kind of a free/lite partitioner out there. I mean I don't think you are going to partition your HDD on a daily basis?

 

There are certain files that cannot be moved while the OS is running. This is the issue you are facing. What you need is a bootable CD or DVD with a partitioning app on it so that you can do the resizing while Vista is not running. There are several threads here detailing various such tools.

Gary

 

Thanks guys I appreciate the feedback, This is why I love this site!!!!!!!

 

I suggest making yourself a gparted livecd (or use an ubuntu install disc, which has gparted on it) and you can then shrink the partition using gparted.

 

EASEUS' Partition Manager should also be able to do what you want - the personal edition is free. What Partition Manager will do in a case such as yours is reboot and then do the actual partition shrinking in a DOS environment before .Windows starts to load; that way, none of the system files on your c drive will be open, and therefore will not prevent resizing of the partition.