Partition Resizing

I've been using FD-ISR for quite a few years, and think it is great. I would like to shrink the size of my system (C) drive that has Windows Vista and FD on it to make room for another partition to store just data on. I have both Vista and Win 7 on this drive, and would like to make all the data available to both. Is there anything special that needs to be done to shrink and then create a new partition on this drive for FD to continue working?

Thanks
Duke

 

Short answer = No.

As long as there is no changes to FDISR preboot, should be no problems reallocating some space.

Might be some specific tidying up depending on what your set-up is.
Be careful preserving old and allocating new drive/partition names/letters.

MAke sure u keep an eye on snapshot sizes and archive destination drive name.

In view of new partition sizes; might need to redo some snapshots and archives after changes to partition sizes.
Be wary of some defraggers if planning some extra tidying.
( cant recall which but some defrag tools have ..erm.. 'misplaced' snapshots)

Keep a fresh system Image j.i.c.

What tool are u thinking of using for Resize/Shrink ?
I have done similar many times with BING from Terabyte with no real problems.

HTH
OOI why Vista AND W7 ?
Regards.

 

I used W7 'Shrink volume' to downsize my system partition. It took several shrinks to get from 160GB down to 55GB as I wanted to move from an HDD to an SSD.
I didn't have a second partition, just the c:.
In your case (or anyone else's) you could archive and then remove the Vista FD snapshot and just 'shrink' the W7 snapshot, then restore the Vista snapshot from an archive which would have to be on a second physical drive of course.
Personally, I use a second drive for my data which makes it available to either my W7 or XP FD-ISR snapshots and that would be what I'd recommend, i.e. leave your system drive alone, add a drive, copy everything you want shared and you're all set. The second drive can be anything, internal/external. If you use an external docking station, you can easily have as many data drives as you can afford. And if you have a dual docking station, you can easily backup data from the active data drive to the backup data drive. Which is what I do .
The trouble is that drives are expensive right now... I was lucky to buy my 2TB drives when they were only $75.
Good luck,
J
'Shrink volume' is found in Computer Management > Storage > Disk Management. Right click on the drive and you will see the "Shrink..' option. It tells you the smallest size that it will allow, run that even if it's not small enough. Then repeat until it is small enough (or can't be any smaller).

 

Ya ...
JW makes a good point: good idea to get extra physical drives for data storage ( + FDISR archives).
Keeping important data/backups/storage on same drive, different partition might be a slightly risky proposal in case of drive fail = lose the lot.
Redundancy rules.

 

Thanks for responding.

I have done the shrinking of my C:system drive from 500GB to 400GB and created a second partition of 100GB. I used a partitioning tool recommended on techsupportalert.com called MiniTool Partition Wizard. I used the bootable CD version so I could do the job outside of the operating system. It worked quite well I believe, and was very fast. I am using the second partition for data, and I back that up to an external harddrive.

I have several Vista and Win7 snapshots right now because I am switching most of my software to Win7. I will probably delete all of the Vista but one when I have everything set up in Win7.

I keep a lot of snapshots because I don't like using archives that well. I have found in Vista that when you restore an archive you loose the Windows update history. I don't know why that happens, since a snapshot is supposed to be an exact copy. If you have an idea about that, I'd be interested to know. I do like the archive concept.

Thanks again,
Duke