Shrink Partition

Shrink Partition on Server 2022/2019/2016 with Disk Management

Shrinking volume varies in Disk Management. Here are some can and can't tips.

• Shrinking NTFS volumes with Disk Management: YES

• Shrinking FAT32 volumes with Disk Management: NO ( Shrink fat32 drive with Partition Resizer)

• Add unallocated space to other drives wth Disk Management: NO (Move in-between partitions with Partition Resizer to move unallocated spaces safely)

Shrinking an NTFS volume is possible in Disk Management, and it only allows creating a new drive with the produced unallocated space after shrinking NTFS volume with Windows built-in tools (Disk Management or Diskpart, same story.)

Here are the steps for shrinking a volume in Disk Management when it's ntfs. (For shrinking fat32 partitions, be free to use tool Partition Resizer Server.)

Step 1 - Open Disk Management in your computer, you may click the Start icon -> Run, and type Diskmgmt.msc

Step 2 - Right click the drive, click Shrink Volume option in the pop up box to go ahead.

Step 3 - Enter the size that you want to shrink, eg, if you want to shrink 10GB, you may enter 10240, which is the result of 1024*10, if you want to shrink 100GB, you may enter 102400, which is 1024*100.

Step 4 - Click Shrink button in the box and confirm the changes.

And then the disk partitions will have some Free space available on the disk map like this.

free space to extend volume disk management

Step 5 - Right click the Free space to delete volume since deleting free space will make it unallocated space in Disk Management.

What can you do with the free space or unallocated space?

• 1, Add the unallocated space to closeby partition

• 2, Copy partition to unallocated space as bakcup

• 3, Create a new drive

• 4, Move unallocated space to other drives (Partition Resizer Server can do the job when Disk Management or Diskpart couldn't)

• 5, Other partition functions...