How to Partition a Hard Drive Without Reinstalling the OS
A partition is an isolated hard drive segment. A hard drive can contain a single partition that consists of the entire drive, or have multiple partitions on the same drive. Using the tools in Windows, you can create a new partition on your hard drive without having to reinstall the operating system. In order to create a new partition on your hard drive, you must first shrink a partition on your current drive, then format a partition, or new volume, in the unallocated space.
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Instructions
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Click on "Start," scroll over to "Computer" and right-click it. A drop-down menu appears.
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Click on "Manage." The Computer Management window appears.
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Click on "Storage" in the left window pane to expand the selection. Click on "Disk Management" below it. A list of connected hard drives and partitions appears in the right window pane.
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Right-click on the partition on the hard drive in the right window pane and select "Shrink Volume." A pop-up window appears.
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Enter the size in megabytes of the new partition that you want to create on the drive in the "Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB" section. Note that 1 GB equals 1024 MB.
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Click "Shrink" and allow the computer to shrink the chosen partition and create available space on the hard drive. The time it takes the computer to perform this task varies based on the size of the hard drive and size of new partition you wish to create. Once complete, a new partition appears in the Computer Management window as "Unallocated Space."
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Click on the "Unallocated Space" partition and choose "New Simple Volume" to open a wizard.
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Click "Next" on the wizard. Click the "Assign the following drive letter" selection and choose a drive letter to assign to the new partition from the drop-down list. Click "Next."
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Select "Format this volume with the following settings" and choose the "File system" -- ideally NTFS -- and "Allocation unit size" from the drop-down menus, based on your preferences. Enter a name for the partition into the "Volume label" field. Check "perform a quick format" and click "Next."
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Review your choices, then click "Finish" to format the partition.
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