Question: 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?
Answer: Okay, found the answer. Let’s leave it here for future reference:
The article reveals that the disk management utility in Windows 7 calls the OS’ defragment tool. If you have the Disk Defragmenter GUI open, you can follow the progress of defragmenting.
You can also cancel the defrag process, which will cause the volume shrink to fail gracefully, with a message saying the shrink operation was cancelled.