Partition sizing

[synaesthesia]

Woops, had a bit of an accident today that would make me glad for Vista's nagging!

 

Went to allocate some more free space to one of the partitions (CC3) and accidentally allocated ALL of the available space to it. Solved the initial space problem obviously, but I can't see a way of undoing that action! No ability to shrink the partition that I can see.

 

Now, obviously the easiest fix is going to be using partition utilities like Partition Magic, Acronis etc to solve this however to the best of my knowledge they need installing/need a restart to work, which is out of the question.

So, any alternatives?

 

Cheers

[Michael]

As far as I am aware, you cannot shrink or undo the changes without a third party application as you mentioned. You're right also that this would require a reboot. If you've resized the system partition I would leave well alone, but if it's a drive just hosting data you should be ok, but will still need to reboot.

 

Whatever you do, always take a full backup before you start resizing partitions!

[PiqueABoo]

There is no native partition shrinking in 2K3 (and it has limits in newer Windows). Sorry, but I think you're stuffed - if you can't reboot it, presumably you also can't kick everyone off whilst you do a zap partition, recreate and restore (preferably from one of two backups).

 

Whether you use 3rd party utils or not you need the server to yourself for a while.

 

PS: Do you actually recall doing the extend wrong? Only I'm 99.99% sure there's a bug in the UI somewhere that may relate to how many times it has been extended before, where it completely ignores the smaller number you type in and uses all the available space.

Edited June 9, 2009 by PiqueABoo
PS

[synaesthesia]

Yup, 100% sure I mucked up Finger-frenzy in clicking "next" too many times

Thankfully it's not a system partition though! Cheers for the input