Disk management problem - Trying to dual-boot...

[iainberryman]

Hello guys,

I'm trying to dual boot on my Surface Pro 3 i5 128GB but have a problem.

I have 52GB free on C: and want to make a 25GB partition but when I try and shrink the volume, it says I can only make a partition of 6534MB.



If anyone can help and offer some advice I'd be really grateful. I really don't want to reinstall windows or upgrade my 8.1 yet.

Thanks,
Iain.

 

[iainberryman]

It's doing something else now. I restarted and found I could have over 23GB



So I choose 21GB, less than it says I can have but I then get...



Any ideas?

 

[David Feifer]

This is actually fairly common when you attempt to resize disks.. The issue is that You have available space but there is information stored in the sectors within the back side of the partition. The manager will not allow a resize if data is located in the affected range. Generally you need to run a utility to defragment and prep the drive. Been a number of years but the last time I did this was using raxco's prefect disk PC Defrag & Optimization | Raxco Software I believe you can run the "Prep for shrink" using the demo version.

We haven't done this in years since windows 7 can boot from virtual hard drives so there is no editing of partitions required. Create the vhd, set it up in the boot loader, then your done.

 

[Guzzler3]

You don't even need to use Raxco, just use the built-in Optimize Defragment tool (actually it's good to make sure it runs on the proper built-in schedule).

The other thing to do before running the Optimize/Defrag is to run the Disk Clean-up program. Make sure you select the "Clean up System files" to get more space deleting options.

 

[Nokia5110]

EaseUs, do not download from CNET. Check the installation.

Will move data from partitions to create what you want.