Thursday, November 22, 2012

How to gain 100-350MB more free space upon Windows installation



When installing Windows Vista or 7 on a new hard drive, the OS creates a 100MB partition right at the beginning of the drive. If you are installing Windows 8, then the size of that partition is 350MB. I have Acer Aspire One ZG5 with 8GB SSD, which is very small and I have to make custom Windows installation, that use less space. Nevertheless, every MB counts! So if you are like me or you just hate that small partition that the OS creates, let me show you how to trick the setup not to create it. It's really simple - create partitions manually, not through the installer. Here's how:

1. Boot your installation.
2. When the setup wants you to choose partition to install Windows to, hit Shift + F10. This should bring command prompt to you.
3. Type diskpart and press Enter. Diskpart is an utility coming with Windows, so you really shouldn't do anything special to get it. In case you make your own installation, make sure you leave diskpart utility on the setup disk.
4. Type list disk and remember the number of the disk you want to partition. In my case it's 0, so replace 0 with your number from now on.
5. Type select disk 0.
6. Type clean (this will erase all the info on the drive, if any).
7. Now if you want the whole drive to be one partition (as in my case), type create partition primary. If you want to have more partitions, type create partition primary size=n where n is the size of the partition you want in MB. The rest of the partitions you can create again here, or later with the GUI.
8. Type select partition 1.
9. Type format fs=ntfs quick.
10. Probably not needed, but just to be sure type active.
11. Type exit, to exit Diskpart and then exit again, to exit cmd.
12. From the setup choose the partition you've just created and proceed with the install without loosing 100/350MB :)