Drive partition

[maddy smith]

My laptop:HP Pavilion g-series, W7, 500HDD, 4GB RAM, i5.

Problem: the drives are like this>222gb, 108gb and 102gb.
My os is in the 222gb drive and I'm not comfortable using the drive with the os in it.a lot of space is wasted here.
I have tried to shrink it but it shows that only some 450mb can be shrinked.

how do it get back this lost space?

 

[SNGX1275]

Provided you have some free space on that partition you should be able to shrink it. What software are you using? Perhaps you should give gParted a try. Boot off a gParted CD or USB and shrink it outside the OS. If you have some time, it probably wouldn't hurt to defragment the partition you are shrinking first.

 

[maddy smith]

I have lots of free space in that drive.I'm not using any software.I try to shrink it directly from the disk management in the system.
thankyou.

I have defragmented it many times.

 

[SNGX1275]

Its a bit concerning that it won't shrink in disk management, which is why I suggested gParted. Did you try that?

 

[Raoul Duke]

You only have a little over 400 GB of space on that drive. Is it possible to buy or borrow a external drive, remove your data and reformat, then put your data back? If you know the brand of the drive they usually have a utility that lets you transfer the OS without a clean install (so if you upgrade or need to replace the HD you can do so). Even a friend with a desktop PC should easily be able to "loan" you that amount of space. An external 500 GB drive would also be useful as a backup for your laptop once you finish this task. If you have the OS disks and the knowledge, backing up your data and a clean install usually make for a nicely running system as well.