Advice on resizing new Dell Laptop NVMe drive partitions

A novice in Windows 10 I am- just like the OP - sought guidance on creating data partitions in the drive and I was advised to decrypt the drive and try partitioning the C: drive. OK, I also found out that third party partitioning programs will not touch the encrypted C: drive. Resize/move partition greyed out. So no-go.

Screenshot



Turned Device Encryption OFF,created Unallocated space 700GB keeping C: at 216.5GB and created five data partitions in 700GB using Windows Disk Management. Job accomplished but I lost Device Encryption. Turning it on gave an error message "Something went wrong". Sought advice from Dell Support. Dell Support told me that "there is no bitlocker encryption in Windows 10 Home"'Microsoft is only trying some experiments in Windows 10 Home"" Factory Reset your PC" I gave them a stick saying that all editions of Windows 10 support Device Encryption provided the hardware supports it and my PC with a TPM module supports Device Encryption.as evidenced in the bios.

I deleted all Data partitions and restored the full space to C: and voila Device Encryption could be turned on and worked. Repartitoned the drive with 5 data partitions with Windows Disk Management as before with Device encryption On
(Remember the third party partitioning programs will not shrink the encrypted C:) and the task was accomplished. Drive C: ,the newly created drives D, E, F, G and H got encrypted.

Since the WINRETOOLS partition has changed to Partition9, I had to set the reagent pointing to partition9. Made a google search and got this path
reagentc /setreimage /path \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partitionX\Recovery\WindowsRE where X is the new partition number of WinRETOOLS partition. Job done.

My present partition structure and reagentc status:






My recommendations to the OP is based on my experience,

1. If your laptop has Device Encryption, partition your C: drive with Device Encryption on.

2. Use only Windows Device Management to shrink C: and create the data partition. (Third party partitioning programs will not work on encrypted drives)

3. Since you are creating only one data partition, your new WINRETOOLS partition will be partition#5

4, Point the Recovery Agent to this path to reestablish the link. ( At the time of my writing my post #6, I could n't recall the exact command to be given -blame it on my poor memory - and I had to do a re-research. Thanks to @dalchina also who in one thread has given this path to reestablish the link. Request dalchina to check whether the setreimage command I had given is right.

The end.

Looks fine in the screenshot - the terminal E is missing in your text:
,

I had to set the reagent pointing to parttion 8. Made a google search and got this path
reagentc /setreimage /path \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partitionX\Recovery\WindowsR where

Thanks @dalchina for pointing out the inadvertent omission. Corrected. Also corrected Partition#8 to Partition#9 where winre.wim exists in my PC.(These days I do a lot of mistakes )

It now reads:
"Since the WINRETOOLS partition has changed to Partition9, I had to set the reagent pointing to partition9. Made a google search and got this path
reagentc /setreimage /path \\?\GLOBALROOT\device\harddisk0\partitionX\Recovery\WindowsRE where X is the new partition number of WinRETOOLS partition. Job done."

That depends. You've used Disk Management which does not show the 16Mb partition typically present in a UEFI installation.
Compare


- note the use of DISKPART to get partition numbers.

Further, you have two possible recovery partitions to the right of C:

Miranova23 said:

So after a hectic few weeks of getting settled back in to the semester, & finally finding the time to let my brain calmly process all of the information explained here, I want to see if I actually do need to do anything with redirecting the recovery path...

& sorry, I realize now that I had just completely missed the question about encryption, but yes, I let it set up encryption when Windows was first getting itself set up, so that did turn out to be important after all. I just used Windows Disk Management as jumanji explained in reply #11. No hiccups for me here, thanks! (I'm a digital designer & with all the programs I need on my desktop, my C drive there has over 500GB of 1TB used. On this new laptop, I want to at least be able to open any of my files. Hence, 500GB right off the bat for C.)

However, reagentc seems to still point to Partition 4 (selected in above screencap), which is what it should be, correct?

The listing in your Windows Disk Management shows that the 990 MB partition after D: is ( Disk 0 Partition 4). So the reagentc is correctly pointing to it.

I am just wondering what happened to the MSR partition that normally exists between Partition 1 (ESP) and Partition C: in your case. Below is the screenshot of my DELL Inspiron 3280 Screenshot.



You may view your disk in MiniTool Partition Wizard and check whether the MSR partition exists or not. You may also rightclick on the 990MB WINRETOOLS partition > explore and see the contents as shown in the above screenshot.