There are times when a user of Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Vista may need to expand or shrink his hard drive partitions. It can be used to fulfill large space requirements and use the unused hard drive space. It is possible to expand or shrink Windows Vista and Windows 7 hard drive partitions easily using an in-built tool, known as Disk Management. You do not require any third-party tool for this purpose.

However, in some cases, the expand and shrink operation may stop halfway and cause serious problem. After such incidents, all your critical files may become inaccessible and you may face file loss. In such cases, File Recovery Software is the only way to go for.

How to use Disk Management in Windows 7 and Vista:

You can open and use this utility as follows:

•    Open Control Panel of your Windows computer.

•    Type ‘partition’ in search box and press enter.

•    It displays the list of all the hard drive partitions, their size, file system and other related information.

•    Right-click on the partition you want to modify.

•    Select the appropriate option and follow on-screen instructions.

Although, Disk Management is a very useful utility, in some cases the partition modification process either gets interrupted or does not start and you face an error message similar to the following one:

“Disk 1 (size, number of clusters, and number of sectors) appears to have partitions created using a different drive geometry (disk geometry information). This serious problem can lead to data loss.

No partition manipulations should be made to this disk using this product or the operating system’s products. You should back up the data on this disk, delete all partitions, create new partitions under the new drive geometry, and then restore your data using the backup.”

Interruption of the expansion and shrinking process makes the partition inaccessible and causes severe file loss. In such events, you need to restore lost files from the most recent backup. However, if the backup is not available or updated, Windows File Recovery is required.

You can easily and safely recover lost Windows files using Deleted File Recovery software. They use high-end scanning techniques to systematically scan the whole hard drive and extract all lost files. The File Recovery tools are capable of handling all types of file loss situations.

Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery software successfully recovers lost photos, videos, music files, MS Office files, zip files, and more. It supports recovery of lost/deleted files from FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, VFAT, NTFS, and NTFS5 file system partitions. The software can be used with Microsoft Windows 7, Vista, 2003, XP, and 2000.