How in the Tech

Resizing a NTFS Partition for Free

By Adam Myers ⋅ October 8, 2008 ⋅ Tags: File Management, System Administration

I added another drive to my software raid 5 media server as I was running short on space – I’m a collector I guess. I’m not overly concerned with performance so I am using the Nvidia Mediashield technology available on most Nvidia chipset based motherboards. After going through the appropriate steps and allowing Mediashield to rebuild my raid array I was dismayed when I found the array size to Vista unchanged. Mediashield had added the new drive to the raid 5 setup but left the capacity the same – it added an unpartitioned space at the end of the array. In Linux, most of the modern filesystems allow one to resize the filesystem on the fly. In the past, to do the same thing in a Windows environment required commercial software and a bit of finger crossing and luck. All this has changed with Vista – Disk Management now allows you to shrink or expand NTFS partitions.

1. Open the Control Panel from the Vista Start Menu and type in disk in the search box. Click Create and format hard disk partitions.



2. To expand a partition in Disk Management, right click on the partition and select Expand Volume. The Extend Volume Wizard allows you to dial in your desired results – on the assumption that the disk contains a chunk of unallocated space.



3. Similarly, to shrink a volume right click on the partition and choose Shrink Volume.

Either option happens instanteously with no reboot necessary. While the whole operation is painless, you should always take care of your data and backup before doing work of this nature. It’s a mistake you only make once!