You cannot shrink the active system partition while Windows is running. Not safely. The standard tools would cry "Access Denied." A reformat and restore would take eight hours. He had three.
He booted the server from the USB. The Paragon interface loaded: clean, clinical, terrifying in its power. The two partitions glowed blue and green on a gray virtual disk. paragon partition manager
The database started without a single error. You cannot shrink the active system partition while
Step two: Grow D:. He selected the D: partition, dragged its left edge into the unallocated space. The slider snapped into place. "Merge into D:." paragon partition manager