How to Partition Your Hard Drive in Vista

Partitioning a hard drive can be useful for many reasons. Most people partition their hard drives for better organization. Many others partition for the purpose of dual booting their computer with another operating system like Linux or FreeBSD. Before we get started make sure you have a good chunk of free space on your hard drive; you may also want to defrag it beforehand, as well.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• PC with Windows

1. ~Open Computer Management~
   
   Navigate to Start Menu > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management. You will need administrative privileges to continue (not a problem for most people).

2. 
    
   Disk Management Window

   ~Find Your Drive~
   
   In the left hand pane of the window that opens up select Disk Management, it's underneath Storage. On this screen you will find all of the hard drives and optical drives on your computer. Find the drive letter of the hard drive you wish to partition.

3. 
    

   ~Shrink~
   
   Right click that drive and select Shrink Volume. It should query for available space to shrink and then pop up a window asking for the amount you wish to shrink. Enter the amount desired in MB and click shrink. This might take a while depending on how much space you are freeing up for the partition.

4. ~Partition Type~
   
   Now, you'll see a block of Unallocated Space. Right click it and select New Partition. For the sake of this exercise just select Primary Partition (you can always reformat it and change it to Extended at a later time if need be).

5. ~Partition Size & Drive Letter~
   
   The next screen will ask you to specify a size, the default is usually fine (it's the maximum amount available) unless you plan on creating multiple partitions. Hit next, give your partition a drive letter and hit next again.

6. ~Format~
   
   If you're only planning to use this partition with your current installation of Windows then select NTFS. Volume Label is the name of your partition, make it cool! Now, select Quick Format and click next.

7. ~Partition!~
   
   The last screen here just reviews all the settings. Select Finish, wait for it to format and voila! You're all set :)

Tips & Warnings

• Close any programs you have running before doing this, it can save you some time.
• If you want to manage many partitions for multiple operating systems on one computer, I suggest you check out a professional partition management software like Disk Director. I've placed a link in the resources section below.
• Computer Management is a powerful tool. Be careful not to select the wrong drive to format, you can lose a lot of data this way!

Resources

• Disk Director - Partition Management Software