When you shrink a volume in Windows 7, the Disk Management UI doesn’t provide any progress information or the ability to cancel the shrink. However, the Disk Defragmenter UI actually provides you with both! This post will tell you how to take control of a running shrink operation!

View the Progress of a Volume Shrink

A little known fact about the volume shrink tool in Windows 7 is that it actually invokes the disk defragmenter. The disk defragmenter is used to clear space at the end of the volume so that it can be shrunk. You can observe this by invoking a shrink operation with the the Disk Defragmenter UI open. When you request to shrink a volume, the Disk Management UI first ‘queries’ a volume for the shrinkable space. While this is happening the Disk Defragmenter will show that it is performing analysis on this volume. See the screenshot below:

Now when we confirm the operation and the shrink begins, look what happens in the Disk Defragmenter UI:

The Disk Defragmenter UI shows “100% Shrunk”. The Disk Defragmenter is performing the file consolidation work for the shrink operation.

Using the Disk Defragmenter UI, we can see the progress for a shrink operation that is not provided by the Disk Management UI!

Cancel a Volume Shrink

The Disk Management UI in Windows 7 provides no way of cancelling a shrink operation once it has begun (or the sometimes long analysis process). However because the Disk Defragmenter does provide cancellation options, we can use the Disk Defragmenter UI or command line tool to actually cancel the shrink for us!

Select the volume being ‘shrunk’ in the Disk Defragmenter UI and press the ‘Stop Operation’ button. The Disk Management UI will return a failure message and the shrink operation will not proceed.

You have successfully cancelled the shrink operation!