Windows – Shrink hibernate partition on Windows 7

hibernatemulti-bootpartitioningssdwindows

After a thorough discussion with Google we couldn't consent on this one.

How can I shrink the Hibernate partition which was set up by Windows 7 OEM?
My laptop has a harddisk drive and an additional SSD drive (20GB) which is used entirely by this hibernate partition (it's an Ultrabook, so I believe there are also some Intel drivers for quick waking up).

I want to add dual boot with an Ubuntu and I'd like to give some of this space to Ubuntu as swap disk too.

While under Win7 the partition manager can't touch this partition, GParted sees it as a raw partition.

I'd like to shrink it so that Win can still use it as before (just smaller) and that Linux will use it for swap.

Can this be achived?

Note: I'm trying not to wipe the partition and recreate because I'm thinking that the OEM stuff are there, on this partition. Or am I wrong?

EDIT:

Like Indrek suggested, this partition is probably a SRT cache.
And SRT is done using RAID, so I think the entire drive is used.

Best Answer

If the partition isn't usable in Windows (ie. isn't formatted as a filesystem that Windows can read and write), then it can't be used for hibernation, because Windows cannot place the hiberfil.sys file on it. Also the size of the SSD is a bit excessive, given that the hibernation file need not exceed the amount of physical memory you have, which is probably around 4-8 GB.

Given that, it's much more likely that the SSD is used as a cache for the main hard drive, to speed up access to frequently used files and programs; this is known as Intel Smart Response Technology, though it may also be some sort of proprietary implementation by Acer.

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