Why so stingy?
It turns out that Windows doesn??™t necessarily store all your data at the
beginning of a partition, but rather scatters it around to help reduce fragmentation.
As a result, there may be some data toward the end, serving as a barrier
to prevent Disk Management from shrinking your drive past that point.
Figure 5-16. Use the Shrink Volume window to make space on your drive for new
partitions
270 | Chapter 5: Performance
The solution is to use the command-line Disk Defragmenter tool (defrag.exe)
with the -w parameter, as described in ???A Defragmentation Crash Course,???
earlier in this chapter. When that??™s done, return to Disk Management and
try Shrink Volume once more.
If the Shrink Volume feature in Disk Management still won??™t give you as
much space as you need, you??™ll need a more capable program like Disk
Director, covered next.
Alternatives to Disk Management
The Disk Management utility is not your only choice when it comes to
repartitioning drives, but as far as the tools included with Windows Vista
are concerned, it??™s the best one.
The other usable alternative is Vista??™s DiskPart utility (diskpart.exe), a way of
viewing, adding, and removing partitions from the Command Prompt; see the
upcoming sidebar ???The DiskPart Command-Line Tool??? for a walkthrough.
In the good old days??”also known simply as the old days??”the only way to
resize partitions without deleting the data on them was to use a program
called PartitionMagic.
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