Trying to shrink C: drive for Fedora dual-boot. Disk Management only allows 24GB despite having 355GB free space.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to dual-boot Fedora (KDE plasma using netinst) alongside Windows on my laptop. I want to allocate 50 GB (51200 MB) of unallocated space for Fedora.

My laptop only has a single C: drive partition (around 475 GB total) with about 355 GB of free space.

When I open Windows Disk Management and try to shrink the C: drive, the "Size of available shrink space in MB" is locked at only 24146 MB (around 23.5 GB). Because of this, the "Shrink" button is grayed out when I type 51200 MB.

Here is what I've done so far:

- Ran `powercfg /h off` in CMD as administrator to disable hibernation and remove the hiberfil.sys file.

- Restarted the PC, but the available shrink space is still exactly the same.

And i don't have an external hard drive to take a full backup right now, and all my university work/projects are on this single C: partition, so I want to be as safe as possible.

What is the safest way to bypass this? Should I disable the pagefile (swap file) next, or should I use a third-party tool like AOMEI? Some friends warned me against third-party tools since I don't have a backup.

Any advice would be highly appreciated. Thanks!