Cannot shrink partition

[Fasauceome]

I'm helping someone shrink a partition but they can't shrink below a certain amount, even though they are only using 200GB of the drive it says 490GB is as low as it's allowed

 

 

Reinstalling windows is more of a hassle, so don't recommend that instead please. I know, clear junk, etc, don't care.

[aisle9]

How old is the drive? Bad sectors can cause that.

[Fasauceome]

1 minute ago, aisle9 said:

How old is the drive? Bad sectors can cause that.

It's a laptop hard drive form an Acer aspire e15, so not that old

 

[aisle9]

6 minutes ago, fasauceome said:

It's a laptop hard drive form an Acer aspire e15, so not that old

 

Might be worth running a SMART test if nothing else works.

Two more ideas: have you tried the old reliable "sfc /scannow" yet to see if that corrects it? I doubt it would, but I've seen scannow fix some pretty random stuff. If it's a HDD, maybe defrag it? I haven't done that since Windows 7 so I honestly don't know if that's even a thing anymore. If BitLocker is enabled (highly doubtful on an E15), cut that off first.

 

Another idea that's worked for me in the past: go ahead and do whatever shrink it will allow you to do. Then, after the shrink is done, reboot and try to shrink the partition again. Lather, rinse, repeat until it stops finding free space. I've only had to do that a couple of times, and both times were on elderly hard drives with bad sectors, but it worked.

[Fasauceome]

4 minutes ago, aisle9 said:

If it's a HDD, maybe defrag it? I haven't done that since Windows 7 so I honestly don't know if that's even a thing anymore

Windows 10 auto defrags every week or so these days. I'll try some of the other steps