Preparatory Steps

• Goto ‘Start–>Control Panel’.
• Click on ‘Classic View’ in the left pan.
• Open ‘Administrative Tools’ from the right pan.
  
• Open ‘Computer Management’ from the right pan.
  
• Windows Vista will prompt you to confirm. Click on ‘Continue’.
• Double click on ‘Storage’ and then on ‘Disk Management  (Local)’
• You will be taken to ‘Computer Management’ screen. You can see the snapshot of your drives.
  

Shrink Volume

• Right click on the desired drive and select ‘Shrink Volume’.
• Enter the amount of space to be shrunk.
  
• Once it is done, you can find some unallocated space.
  Create New Volume from Unallocated Space

• Right click on ‘Unallocated’ and select ‘New Simple Volume’.
  
• You will be taken to ‘New Simple Volume Wizard’ window.
  
• Enter volume size and click next to continue.
  
• You can choose to select a drive letter for the newly created drive
• Select the following options and click next to continue.
  ‘Format this volume with the following settings:’
  File system as ‘NTFS’
  Check ‘Perform a quick format’
  
• Click finish to complete the process.

However there are limitations in using this. E.g. You find that you have around 200 GB free space but you could shrink only 50 GB. Read my other post to solve this shrink volume limitation.
http://www.techwhiz.in/2009/03/solution-to-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problem/

For any query please send email to saurabh(at)techwhiz(dot)in

Preparatory Steps

• Make sure you are running in administrator mode.
• Run the disk clean up wizard and delete everything that is shown on screen.
• Disable ‘System Restore’. (Click here to know)
• Disable ‘Pagefile’(Virtual Memory). (Click here to know)
• Disable ‘Hibernation’.  (Click here to know)
• Disable ‘kernel memory dump’. (Click here to know)
• Download ‘Perfect Disk’ and install it.
• Download ‘Auslogics Disk Defrag’ and install it.

I would suggest to first defragment the system using inbuilt software before continuing any further.

Diagnostic Steps

• Run ‘Auslogics Disk Defrag’ .
• Keep an eye on the screen. The yellow box is the MFT(Master File Table).
  
• MFT is the main reason for the limitation in shrinking the volume.

Shifting MFT is only possible when Windows is not accessing it. For that it should run before Windows Vista loads itself. In the following steps, we will try to shift the MFT. MFT may not shift to one end to enable you to shrink the entire free space. MFT shifts subsequently in each step. So you may have repeat shifting MFT unless you cannot do it any further.

Core Steps

1. Run ‘Perfect Disk’
2. Right Click on the desired drive and select ‘Drive Properties’.
   
3. Click on ‘Offline Defragmentation’.
4. Check on all the three options under defragmentation settings and click ‘OK’.
   
5. Restart the system.
6. Before Vista loads, you will notice a black screen with defragmentation going on.
7. After Vista loads itself, perform ‘Shrink Volume’ for whatever space is available.
8. Repeat the steps ’5 to 7′ and shrink the volume till it can be done.

After you are done with this do not forget to perform the following actions.
The following actions are only recommended, it is totally on user’s discretion.

• Enable ‘System Restore’. (Click here to know)
• Enable ‘Pagefile’(Virtual Memory). (Click here to know)
• Enable ‘Hibernation’. (Click here to know)
• Enable ‘kernel memory dump’. (Click here to know)
• Uninstall ‘Perfect Disk’.
• Uninstall ‘Auslogics Disk Defrag’.

For any query please send email to saurabh(at)techwhiz(dot)in