How to Partition Your Hard Drive

I recently purchased a new computer, and the first thing I do when I’m setting up a new computer is re-partition the hard drive.  Since not everyone knows what exactly I’m talking about, or why, and it’s something I think everyone should do when setting up a new computer, it felt like a perfect How To article!

Why? The reason I re-partition my hard drive is so that I can separate out my “data” from the operating system on my computer.  Doing this makes it extremely simple if you ever need to re-install the operating system on your computer.  You can reformat (completely erase) the C: partition (which holds the Windows operating system), without destroying your data located on the “data” partition.

The data partition is where you should store your pictures, documents, music, videos, etc.  Even though your data is protected from being erased during a reformat of your C: drive, it is NOT protected if your hard drive fails altogether, so make sure you continue to backup your data on an external hard drive or an online backup solution (or BOTH!)

How? Even if your computer is not brand new, you still may have a shot of doing this, especially if you have a large hard drive, and haven’t used a ton of it yet.  These steps are for a Windows 7 machine.  In XP you would have to use a utility that you can purchase such as Partition Magic.

Click the Start button, and then right click on “Computer” and select Manage.

Once you have opened the computer management area click on Disk Management under Storage.  When you are in here, you will see the volumes or partitions that already exist in your system on the top right.  Directly under that will be the physical drives that are in your computer.  What this means is the actual hardware components in your PC.  I could have 5 volumes at the top, and only 2 physical drives at the bottom just depends on how you, or the PC manufacturer has set it up.  The hardware component would be your actual hard drive, your CD ROM Drive, an SD Card slot, etc.

Next you will right click on your C: partition, you can do this either in the top section or the bottom section of the right hand side.  Select “Shrink Volume”.  All the numbers that will appear in here may look a little confusing.  The size is listed in MB (MegaBytes).  A Gigabyte is 1000 MB’s.  So a 100 GB hard drive would be listed in this area as 100000 MB.  I like to keep at MINIMUM 50 GB for the C: partition, I prefer to have at least 80-100 GB though.  So adjust the amount to shrink until the bottom number reads 50000 for a 50 GB C: partition or 100000 for a 100 GB C: partition.  Then click “Shrink”.

Now that you have a large portion of your hard drive that is unformatted, you will need to create a new partition in that space.  In the bottom right section you should see the available space right next to your C: partition.  Right click on the free space, and select Format.  A quick format using NTFS should do just fine.  I typically assign it the next letter in the alphabet.  Such as, if C: is taken up with the Operating System partition, and D: is the CD drive, then I’ll assign the new partition E:, but it really doesn’t matter what letter you give it.

When you browse your computer files now there should be a new drive with the letter you gave it that is completely empty.

Tomorrow’s post will show you how to change your default music, pictures, documents, etc folders to automatically store files on the new partition!