How to Partition Hard Drive on Windows 7

Disk partitioning is the division of a hard drive into several logical units. Users rarely partition their hard drives, however, this work has many benefits. Most importantly, when you split the drive, you can isolate the operating system from the data, thereby reducing the risk of data corruption.

Table of Contents

Steps

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Open the Computer Management tool. Open the Start menu, type “Computer Management” in the search bar of the Start menu and then press enter.

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Select the Disk Management tool. Click Disk Management on the left side of the window, you will see all the drives and their partitions on the computer.

In the illustration, there is 1 drive and 2 partitions.

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Make space for the new partition. Right click on the partition that you want to resize and select the Shrink Vpume task.

In the illustration, the selected drive is (C:) .
Note: There may be a partition named System Reserved . We recommend that you do not change this partition.

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Shrink the drive. Enter the size you want to shrink the drive in megabytes (1000 MB = 1GB). Then, click the Shrink button.

In this example, the drive is shrunk to 10000 MB or 10 GB.
Note: You cannot shrink the space beyond the amount specified in the Size of available shrink space in MB section.

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Create a new drive. You should now see an unformatted partition in the Disk Management window. Right click on the unallocated partition and select New Simple Vpume .

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New Simple Vpume Wizard will start. The New Simple Vpume Wizard dialog box will pop up. Click the Next button to continue.

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Enter the new partition size. Enter the amount of memory you want to assign to the new partition and then click the Next button.

In the illustration, the maximum available memory has been allocated to the new partition.
Note: You cannot create a new partition larger than the amount of available memory.

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Name the new partition with a letter or path. Choose from the menu a single letter name for the new partition and then click the “Next” button.

In the illustration, the selected letter name is (A:)
The letter or path name is used by Windows to identify and navigate to your new partition.

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Setup for the new partition.

Click Format this vpume with the fplowing settings: (Format this partition with the following settings:)
For File System , select NTFS
For Allocation unit size , select Default
For Vpume Label , enter the name you want to give the new drive.
Click Perform a quick format .
Then click the Next button

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Create a new partition. Review your setup and then click Finish .

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New partition format.

A dialog box will pop up asking you to partition your new drive. Click Format disk .
Another window will pop up. Keeping these settings as is, click the Start button.
A warning will appear. Click OK .

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Check the new drive. If the operations are correct, you should see your new drive in the Disk Management window.

Warning

Before you begin, we recommend that you back up all your data to another computer or removable storage device. This will help prevent data loss if something goes wrong.

Steps

Warning

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