Also, ensure the partition isn’t an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partition, Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) system partition, or recovery partition.

If you’re following along, be sure you have a disk that has some unused space with an unformatted volume or one formatted as NTFS (see Creating and Formatting a Volume). Unallocated space is an inactive space or space that does not belong to any partition. Shrinking a volume turns unused space from the selected volume into unallocated space. Now that we have the basics out of the way let’s now get down to actually doing something useful with Diskpart! First up is shrinking a volume on a disk. You can tell you’re in a diskpart session from the new DISKPART> prompt, as shown below. In PowerShell, open a Diskpart session by typing diskpart. To open up the Diskpart shell, open Windows PowerShell as administrator.Ĭmd.exe will also work, but since PowerShell is the successor to the cmd.exe, the tutorial will use PowerShell. Instead of repeatedly typing the command diskpart over and over again, you instead run it once to be brought into an interactive session.

A local user account account with administrator privileges to manage Windows storage.ĭiskpart, unlike many other command-line utilities, is interactive.Windows 7+ – All demos in this tutorial will use Windows 10, but everything should still work for older Windows versions.If you’d like to follow along with any demos in this tutorial, be sure you have the following: In this tutorial, you will learn how to shrink, extend and delete volumes, and manage unallocated space using Diskpart. Not seeing the video? Make sure your ad blocker is disabled.

Disk management cmd