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Okay, maybe this is me worrying about nothing, but...
I have a 500 Gb. external drive where I want to create a second partition. I plug it into my Windows 7 box, use Disk Manager and pick the "Shrink Volume" option. It says that the maximum amount to shrink is around 150 Gb. I hit "OK" and it starts working... and it's been going on for about half an hour.
The light of the external HD is constantly working. Disk Manager is greyed out and has the "does not respond" message on the top bar; basically, it's behaving as a non-responding application.
Is this normal for a drive of this size, or did the application hang? How long would it typically take for a drive like this to resize its partition?
PaulJ
Posted 2012-11-08T20:59:02.643
Reputation: 1 089
1Please also note that at least for me the progress shown by the Disk Defragmenter is hardly linear: It seemed stuck at 52% for half an hour with a jump to 100% after this hiatus. Anyway, it worked. – Tom Pohl – 2018-05-23T13:54:53.223
2That's a very interesting link (+1 for finding it!), but for future reference can you summarise the article here? After all, that link may break in future and/or the page may disappear. – Karan – 2012-11-09T00:12:14.200
2Thanks for editing. I'll just add that, despite the above, the progress indicator isn't very responsive (it got stuck at 25% forever), and that, in total, the resizing took about 3 hours (500 Gb. 3.5' drive, USB connection). – PaulJ – 2012-11-09T15:15:31.273
9It is also worth noting, that even though the link says you need to open Disk Defragmenter *before* running the volume shrink, it is actually still quite possible to see the progress of a running volume shrink by opening Disk Defragmenter while the process is already running (you can directly run dfrgui.exe using win+r, as a shortcut). – aaaronic – 2014-01-08T04:39:59.147