Partitioning outside of Windows 7 environment?

[GundamF91]

When I set up Windows 7, I forgot to partition a 2TB drive so OS was just installed on a giant C: \ drive. I want to partition out the drive but from the Diskeeper analysis, Win 7 put its system files toward middle of the disk, about 1TB. So this meant that i could only partition 2TB into 2 1TB volumes. I would like to reduce C: \ down to 100GB.

I thought Acronis Disk Director would be able to move those system files up into C: \ when it creates something smaller but when the computer restarts, Acronis starts the partitioning process, it goes fine, but then fails at the last step. I suspect it was not able to move the system files from the back of the physical drive to the now smaller C: \? Do now I have to reinstall Windows to make the partition work, or is there a way to reduce C: \ volume down to 100GB even though the system file is sitting at 1TB mark?

 

[lxskllr]

you could try Gparted from a live CD. I really don't know if that'll work, but it's worth a shot.

 

[tomt4535]

+1 for Gparted. If that dosent work, and you just finished installing Windows, just reinstall again and partition it how you want it.

 

[yinan]

have you tried shrinking the volume natively through Disk Management built into Windows?

 

[corkyg]

Since you have Acronis DD, have you created the bootable CD it can make? Then you boot from it and totally bypass the Windows OS.

 

[JackMDS]

I did not try it but I thing that the Acronis Disk Director 10 can not do it.
The newer version Disk Director 11 should be able to do so.


😎

 

[Gooberlx2]

I've done this before (with Vista). I first used an Ultimate Boot CD to defrag. I'm pretty sure one of the defrag tools has the options to move files to the front or back of the drive. And then Gparted to move/resize the existing partition. The defrag step was probably unnecessary, but it didn't hurt anything either.

I'm pretty sure I needed to boot to a recovery console afterwords to repair either the mbr, bootloader, or both.

edit: Like someone else said, if this is a fairly fresh install, it might take you less time to just start from scratch. My drive wasn't even 1TB and it took quite a long time to do.