Work with partitions in Windows Vista when Disk Management doesn’t work

Windows Vista’s Disk Management tool can be quite deceiving. It allows you to work with partitions at ease in a presentable GUI format - but with problems. There have been a lot of complaints and confusion as to why Windows Vista grays out the extend volume and shrink volume properties. In response to this, their is an alternative way to work with partitions, allowing you to easily resize, delete, and create partitions.

Diskpart.exe does a very good job at working with partitions. Unlike Disk Management, Diskpart actually works!

Before continuing, make sure that you:

Backed up all important files
Do not run diskpart.exe with Dynamic Disks

1. First, you’ll want to pull out your Start Menu and type diskpart.exe in Run.

This will open a command-prompt like window. At this window, type list disk. This will list all your available hard disks.

http://gallery.techarena.in/data/513/listdisksd1.jpg

2. Proceed by typing select disk <disk number> to select the disk you want to work with.

Creating a Partition or Volume:

At this point in time, you can create a partition. Type create and a set of new options will be presented to you. To proceed, just type create <new option>. (e.g. create volume)

3. Now we want to see which number is associated with the volume we want to work with. To obtain this list, type list volume.

http://gallery.techarena.in/data/513/volume1.jpg

4. Select the desired volume by typing: select volume <number> or select partition <number>

You then have a list of options to choose from. Below is a list of commands you can type in depending on what you want to do with your selected volume. If you don’t input a number for size, the program will automatically use all the space available for your operation. For the purpose of this tutorial, I have decided to work with 10GB. (1000MB = 1GB)

Shrink desired=10000 minimum=2000 (Shrinks the volume by 10GB. If that’s not possible, this command makes sure that you at least shrink the volume by 2GB.)

Extend size=10000

Delete Partition

Format