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I just bought a laptop with some pre-setup partitions like recovery partition, OEM partition, a smaller Windows-partition and the Windows system partition. Their structure and size looks like this: Partitions after purchase

I don't really like this 650 GB partition for the system... and thought about resizing this partition for a max. 60 GB partition (that should be enough for the Windows-partition), and leaving the rest for my own other data (music, films, etc.) with a program like GParted or anything similar... I don't really want to remove factory partitions, rebuild the whole partition system and reinstall Windows.

Some say it's not a really good practice to resize or restructure any partition after an OS is installed onto it.
Let's assume resizing happens without a problem (I think it should with a program like GParted), and the OS is running.

Is there any problem with that approach? Can it cause any kind of problems?
There may be things I didn't think of.

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In my (anecdotal) experience, you can do this, but Windows may need to be reactivated and it'll definitely make you do a chkdsk when it starts back up. As long as you don't delete any partitions you should be safe, but do make a backup and have a recovery disk on-hand. –  nhinkle Dec 24 '11 at 4:24
If this were Wikipedia, that weasel-worded "some say" would get a {{who}} after it in such short order. Who says? What, exactly, do they say? Why do you believe them? –  JdeBP Dec 24 '11 at 4:33
Most of those anecdotes are ancient history, but "Partition Tragic" didn't earn its nickname lightly. –  afrazier Dec 24 '11 at 4:39
… which adds to the list: When did they say it? –  JdeBP Dec 24 '11 at 20:40

3 Answers 3

You have risks so you will want to make sure you know what you're doing. However, I do this all the time. I don't care about the "hidden restore" partition and I do not like having the entire drive as one partition. I'll download Ubuntu LiveCD www.ubuntu.com and use the preloaded GParted application to resize.

I've never seen an OS require Reactivation after partitioning. Adding/Removing Hardware, yes, but not partitioning.

The only thing that you may see is that the system will do a checkdisk but that is it. If you have any Bad Sectors on the drive, you may run into more complications. Always make sure your disk is health (CrystalDiskInfo) prior to doing something risky. Especially if you do not have anything important backed up.

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I regularly do that, to both Windows and Linux, haven't seen any problems yet. Although I would suggest you should never touch the recovery partition.

Also, if possible, you should avoid online resizing, do not resize the partition where the current OS lives, which is possible under some limited circumstances. Using a LiveCD or booting to an OS on another partition is recommended.

Lastly, always have a backup. Even if resizing is usually a safe operation, it still has risks, such as if you accidentally unplugged your laptop and it run out of battery in the middle of resizing.

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Good point about the battery - I've managed to mess up an XP install this way (hard poweroff while resize was running); luckily, it was still fixable afterwards. –  Piskvor Mar 19 '12 at 9:11

Oem's have real problems with creating a 5th partition (renders them unbootable), HP for instance does have an issue with this, see this reference

If you shrink C: and create a 5th primary partition it will covert 1 or more of the other partitions to Dynamic, which will render the PC unbootable or possibly unrecoverable using the recovery partition.

Yours appears to already have one of the 4 partitions a (Extended) Logical Partition and would not be considered a primary partition, so you should be safe to shrink C and use the extra space for a Primary or another Logical partition..

Back up your data before shrinking partitions.

Remember you can only have 4 primary partitions, but as many logical partitions as needed.

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