A right-click on a partition and the selection of Shrink Volume will display the option to shrink the volume of the selected hard drive. It happens quite frequently that the partitioning program is offering the volume by a low amount. Some users reported that they could not shrink the partition at all even through they had lots of free Gigabytes hard drive space on the partition.

This is caused by system files that are located at the end of that Windows partition. These system files are practically blocking the ability to shrink the volume of the Windows partition beyond that point.

Below is an image of the shrink volume option on a Windows Vista notebook. The hard drive had more than 80 Gigabytes of free space but Vista offered to shrink that volume by less than 4 Gigabytes.

The only viable option is to run a hard drive defragmentation software that will move the files at the end of the partition to an earlier position. This is only possible before the operating system is loaded. One software that can do that is Perfect Disk. The software is not free but it can be used as a 30 days trial version which is sufficient for the purpose.

This can be done by clicking on the System Files button in the disk partitioning program. This will schedule the partitioning to start before the next Windows Vista start.

The effect can be seen below:

There are alternatives for the commercial software like Easeus Partition Manager or gParted

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