Ethelbert2
Member
I have a dual boot system of Win 7 32 loaded onto a partition alongside a partition with an existing XP SP3; everything works fine. But after running the Win 7 for a while I have decided to use it as the default OS leaving the old XP just to run a couple of things that Win 7 won't deal with (a Dimage slide scanner being the most notable bit where I can't find new drivers).
So I have moved over all the documents and other stuff and deleted various programs I will not need in XP - hopefully shrinking down the space taken on the XP disc space. It is down to about 40% of capacity and the rest is now empty. I wanted then to shrink the XP partition using the partition manager in Win 7, and expand the Win 7 space. I ran a defrag to compact the files as much as possible.
But it will only allow me to shrink by 5Gb, ie 5% or so of the Win XP space. Seems the reason might be system back up files taking up space further out on the disc partition.
So finally my question - should I reload XP giving me the chance to delete the partition and then re-format a new smaller one for the new XP? But it seems like a lot of work and it would put XP on after Win 7 (which is possible I know with BCD but still seems to involve various hassles). Is there another way to shrink the space without messing with the XP which is working fine?
[Finally, I did a small test and did the 5% shrink, which I then restored because Win 7 will not EXPAND into the new space anyway. So maybe it would still not expand if I made the XP partition much smaller?]
Cheers
So I have moved over all the documents and other stuff and deleted various programs I will not need in XP - hopefully shrinking down the space taken on the XP disc space. It is down to about 40% of capacity and the rest is now empty. I wanted then to shrink the XP partition using the partition manager in Win 7, and expand the Win 7 space. I ran a defrag to compact the files as much as possible.
But it will only allow me to shrink by 5Gb, ie 5% or so of the Win XP space. Seems the reason might be system back up files taking up space further out on the disc partition.
So finally my question - should I reload XP giving me the chance to delete the partition and then re-format a new smaller one for the new XP? But it seems like a lot of work and it would put XP on after Win 7 (which is possible I know with BCD but still seems to involve various hassles). Is there another way to shrink the space without messing with the XP which is working fine?
[Finally, I did a small test and did the 5% shrink, which I then restored because Win 7 will not EXPAND into the new space anyway. So maybe it would still not expand if I made the XP partition much smaller?]
Cheers
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