ITBrainz: How to Shrink a hard drive volume in Windows 7

There are times where you will want to shrink the amount of allocated space on your hard drive, referred to as a volume, to make room for another partition. With the Windows 7 Disk Management Utility you can easily shrink a volume & create a new partition.

Shrink a volume

The first step is to start the Disk Management tool with elevated administrative rights. Click the Start menu button, type diskmgmt.msc into the search box, and then right-click the diskmgmt.msc entry to get to the Run as Administrator item in the context menu.

Or you can simply Right Click My computer and select Manage from there you can select Disk management option.

Right-click the drive you want to shrink (D: in our example) and navigate to the Shrink Volume menu item

The Disk Management Tool will take a few seconds to analyze the drive in question and then present you with a summary screen similar to the one shown

The number you can change on this screen is Enter the Amount of Space to Shrink in MB box. I am shrinking drive D by 5000MB (5GB), as you can see in image. Click the Shrink button when you are ready.

When the process is complete, you will have a new unallocated partition. The actual size will be less than what you asked for as there will be some space taken up by the Windows file system, as shown in the Image.

The next step will be to allocate the newly created space into something the operating system can use. Right click on the newly created volume and select New Simple Volume