shrinking acer partition

nickj_2

my daughter has an acer laptop with a 50gb hd , however the c drive is almost full but the d partition with the acer restore to factory settings bit only has about 3-5 gb of data and 20 gb freespace , is there a way of shrinking the partition as all the options are blanked out on the disk management section or can partition manager do this

tronator

nickj wrote: »

my daughter has an acer laptop with a 50gb hd , however the c drive is almost full but the d partition with the acer restore to factory settings bit only has about 3-5 gb of data and 20 gb freespace , is there a way of shrinking the partition as all the options are blanked out on the disk management section or can partition manager do this

There are several programs who can do this. All of them involve booting from a CD and start the partitioning program. Windows doesn't have a built-in program to do it.

One (free) solution is, booting an Ubuntu LiveCD and start GParted.

But be careful, you should always make a backup before messing with your partitions.

penrhyn

OP has you daughter tried deleting stuff she no longer needs.
I suspect she has never cleared the junk that accumulates after a while.

I'd recommend as a start to download and run Ccleaner, that should free up a fair amount of space, then archive stuff she doesn't use much onto a high capacity memory stick, hard drive or DVD.

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

weegie.geek

I agree though that these recovery partitions are stupidly big.

Dell laptop I'm using now - 320GB hard drive, 75GB recovery partition, 5GB used. I know they have to account for future updates and all that, but I doubt it'll ever exceed 20GB, so to a lot of people that's 55GB wasted. They shouldn't sell it as a 320GB drive if it's a pain in the bum to use 55GB of it.

nickj_2

penrhyn wrote: »

OP has you daughter tried deleting stuff she no longer needs.
I suspect she has never cleared the junk that accumulates after a while.

I'd recommend as a start to download and run Ccleaner, that should free up a fair amount of space, then archive stuff she doesn't use much onto a high capacity memory stick, hard drive or DVD.

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

tbh there's not a great deal on there , i've run disc cleaner and ccleaner and removed unwanted progs , it's not as if she's got loads of music or photos or huge software on there

Donnie

Don't attempt to partition the disc until you have backed up the Recovery folder and make sure that you don't delete the partition as you will still need it for the Recovery folder.

Unless you are confident of your actions, simply copy the music, video and picture folders over to the D drive. Once completed you can delete the contents of these folders from the C drive therein clearing the space.

Use WinDirStat to see what you can move.

Which OS?

Hammyman

tronator wrote: »

There are several programs who can do this. ]

...none which have been needed since Vista.

If you're running Vista or Windows 7, you can resize the partitions on the fly with the Disk Management.

tronator

Hammyman wrote: »

If you're running Vista or Windows 7, you can resize the partitions on the fly with the Disk Management.

That's new to me, the last version I used was XP.

I quickly googled a bit and the resizing feature seems to be quite limited. You cannot free up space used by system files and you only can add more space at the end of a partition. Also this tool doesn't seem to move data. I read through a few forums and there are still recommending 3rd party tools.

nickj_2

Hammyman wrote: »

...none which have been needed since Vista.

If you're running Vista or Windows 7, you can resize the partitions on the fly with the Disk Management.

unfortunately this is not the case with acer pc/s laptops the shrink partition option is blanked out on the recovery section/d drive

nickj_2

Donnie wrote: »

Don't attempt to partition the disc until you have backed up the Recovery folder and make sure that you don't delete the partition as you will still need it for the Recovery folder.

Unless you are confident of your actions, simply copy the music, video and picture folders over to the D drive. Once completed you can delete the contents of these folders from the C drive therein clearing the space.

Use WinDirStat to see what you can move.

Which OS?

vista ....

Donnie

nickj wrote: »

vista ....

Was thinking of the Winsxs folder.

More info here.