I'm having trouble shrinking my primary partition on Windows 10. It seems like there's no shrinkable space available, which I believe is due to unmovable OS files. I've tried using three different third-party utilities, but each one hits me with an 'upgrade to do this' screen after installation. Is there a free utility out there that actually works for shrinking partitions? Also, I've already attempted defragmenting and there's 30GB free on my SSD. Any other suggestions?
3 Answers
I’ve found that Partition Wizard works pretty well for shrinking partitions without issues. You might want to give that a shot!
EaseUS has some free utilities that can manage this pretty easily, especially if it’s a basic disk. But if it’s a dynamic disk, you’ll need the Pro version. Here’s a link to their free partition manager:
https://www.easeus.com/partition-manager/epm-free.html?srsltid=AfmBOooSpuHLzG760azQY__MXtvPq_B4epwPE05DaFqF0-oYH5ljvPVK
I’ve used GParted in the past, and it's solid for this kind of task. Also, a little tip: defragmenting an SSD doesn’t really help since it's already running garbage collection and TRIM. Just be careful shrinking if you only have 30GB free; you might be setting yourself up for a system resource issue.
I actually tried EaseUS, and it wouldn’t let me change anything without buying the Pro version. I don’t think it’s a dynamic disk though.