How to partition a hard drive in Windows Vista
10 years ago, Microsoft released Windows Vista and it will be killed in next month (April 11, 2017), many people like the aero effect, although the OS itself runs slow and response longer than Windows XP in many ways. Here's the official announcement:
After April 11, 2017, Windows Vista customers will no longer receive new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates from Microsoft. Microsoft has provided support for Windows Vista for the past 10 years, but the time has come for us, along with our hardware and software partners, to invest our resources towards more recent technologies so that we can continue to deliver great new experiences.
Before you upgrade to Windows 10, backup data is needed, so when a new disk is plugged in, we can do the following steps to make a copy of the original disk:
- Download Partition Expert Free Edition, since we are about to leave this OS, we don't need to install this software, just try the portable edition and run.
- Click the data partition you want to backup and select Copy Volume to continue.
- In the Copy Volume wizard window, we click on unallocated space to store data
For users who have deep love in Windows Vista and don't want to do any upgrade to Windows 10, who only want to repartition hard drive to enlarge C Drive capacity, Partition Expert can help when the system partition runs out of space:
- Click D Drive or other drive with more free space in one disk, not another disk, and choose Resize Move Volume.
- In the resize partition window, shrink this partition with the handle, just drag the handle to shrink the large capacity partition, check the mini-disk-map below, when you drag the handle, you're making unallocated space, stop dragging the free space below meets your needs.
- Now between C Drive and D Drive, there's unallocated space. Click C Drive and Resize Move it, in the partition bar, unallocated space is followed C Drive, so we drag the handle to the right end, and click OK and Commit.
For security reason, Microsoft still advises us to upgrade Vista to Windows 10, not Windows 7 or Window 8, but the safer system Windows 10. Below we listed Windows 7 and 8 support end time:
- Windows 7: 14 January 2020 (extended support ends)
- Windows 8: 9 January 2018 (the mainstream support ends)
- Windows 8: 10 January 2023 (extended support ends)