Paragon Partition Manager |top| -

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.

Marcus ejected the drive, pocketed it, and walked out into the dawn. Behind him, the server hummed its peaceful lullaby once more. The data had not been destroyed. It had simply been moved—perfectly, invisibly, and with absolute precision.

He clicked .

Diane paused. "I don't know what that means, but good work. Go home."

His finger hovered over "Apply."

Step one: Shrink C:. He right-clicked. "Resize/Move." A slider appeared. He dragged the right edge of the blue C: block leftward, carving 1.2TB of "Unallocated Space" from the end of the drive. Paragon calculated. "Estimated time: 4 minutes. Data integrity: Verified."

Second click. .

The problem was a nightmare. The server's 4TB RAID array was split into two partitions: C: (OS) and D: (Data). D: was full—98% saturated. The company had ignored his last three memos about archiving old projects. Now, the database that fed their entire warehouse management system was choking, throwing "insufficient disk space" errors despite 1.2TB of free space before the D: partition.