I wanted to dual boot fedora with Windows 11 and decided to partition my C drive but it shows the size available to shrink as around 900mb even though I have more than 250gb of available space in my drive.
I have already dual booted once before on this machine before switching back to Windows only and I would like to get back into linux but I can't seem to solve this issue.
From my research, the problem is caused by some immovable files resulting in discontiguous space in the drive? I have tried various solutions available online like disabling page files, deleting restore points and using 3rd party software (but all of them required paid plans to defrag/shrink my drive), none of them helped (though I think disabling page files got my available shrink space from 500mb to 900mb, essentially the problem still persists). I have also tried the inbuilt defrag utility of windows but the problem persists.
One thing that I haven't tried is trying to shrink through GParted because I have to boot using a USB stick in order to use it so I'm concerned it might break my existing windows install or personal files. Can anyone confirm if it is risk free? Or any other solutions I can try?