Hard Drive Shrinking Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1

Computing, Software, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1

Hard Drive Shrinking Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1

21 Feb , 2016  

Shrinking Disk Volumes on Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1 – (Hard Drive Shrinking)

During attempt of Hard Drive Shrinking, you will find “unmovable segments” that will be restricting the amount you can shrink a hard drive volume.
These “U.S’s” are due to services etc in windows, which are using the reserved space on your drive.

Hard Drive Shrinking Windows 7 / 8 / 8.1So some ‘trial and error’ is required, use following:

Try Hard Drive Shrinking procedure to test for your required shrink capacity.

1/ To attempt Hard Drive Shrinking, use the built in windows disk management (diskmgmt.msc).
2/ Select relevant partition, and right click ‘Shrink Volume‘.
3/ Use windows ‘Event Viewer’ to look up the shrink error 259.
4/ Disable necessary services. The error details from previous step will help you provide clues to the culprit. My list of found culprits are:
• Windows Search Service – DISABLE Temporarily!
• Windows Font Cache Service – DISABLE Temporarily!
• System Page file (virtual memory) – Turn off!
• System Restore – Turn Off!
• Thumbnail Cache – Delete thumbnail files! (C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows \Explorer)
(open task manager and an elevated (administrator) command prompt, leave both open, on the process tab, kill explorer.exe, use the command prompt to delete the files, then use task manager and do a File >New Task >type in explorer.exe to load you desktop again.
5/ Repeat above Hard Drive Shrinking steps till you can shrink your volume to your own required size.

 

Perform the Hard Drive Shrinking

Upon achieving the required volume shrink capacity in above steps, perform the shrink, again still using Windows disk management.

My Hard Drive Shrinking test was using a 250GB drive shrinking it to 120GB (on a non maintained drive, not defraged!).

This took 35 minutes to complete!!!

(I could now clone this volume to my brand new 120GB Solid State Drive.)

 

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