I’ve made the mistake of making the system partition too small on a computer a time or two before. I’ve also worked on computers whose system drives were filling up, but plenty of room was free on the second partition. You used to have to purchase software to adjust the partition size after you already had data on the disk, unless you didn’t mind wiping the disk and starting over.

Not any more. Fortunately, there’s a free bootable cd image you can download and burn to disc to manage your partitions, leaving your data intact.

A Live CD is a bootable cd that boots and loads an operating system that runs entirely in memory. GParted can be used for creating, destroying, resizing, moving, checking and copying partitions, and the filesystems on them. It has been available for Linux for some time now. Now that it is usable with NTFS filesystems, GParted-LiveCD is a great free piece of software to adjust your Windows disk partitions. It has a user-friendly graphical interface that allows you to make changes, then commit them to disk. Several screenshots are available here to see what it looks like. At only ~52mb, it will fit on a business card cd and work like a champ.

To download the CD image, follow this link and get the latest version (3.4-11 at the time of this article)