Partition a Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Andrews. Today, I'm going to show you how to partition a hard drive. Let's go to our computer here, and I have a second hard drive installed. I'm just going to click on my start button and I'm going to right click on my computer, and I'm going to go to manage. Now, in Vista you have to be an administrator, so I'm going to click on continue. This brings up the computer management interface, and what we're interested in is under storage. We're going to click on disk management. This pull, this pulls up the list of all the disks that we have in our system. So, this disk one is the is the new hard drive that I've just connected, and I want to create a partition on this hard drive. I'm basically going to right click on the black unallocated area, and click on new simple volume. Now, from there I'm going to click on next, and then I'm going to choose the size of the partition I'd like to create in megabytes. Let's say I want to create a ten gigabyte partition, so I'm going to type in 10,000 because, you know, approximately 10,000 megabytes is ten gigabytes. After you type that in click next, choose the drive letter that you would like to assign that partition to; I'm going to go with the P drive, and say next. Now, we choose the file system that we'd like to use. The Microsoft default file system is NTFS. You'd want to use FAT32 if you want to connect this hard drive to a non-Microsoft computer. We're going to click on NTFS, and we're going to give it a volume of new partition. That's the label that's going to show up. You have the option to perform a quick format which'll be a whole lot faster, but I don't recommend that you do that because it won't check your drive for errors. So, just click next, and then click finish. And as you can see, our new partition here on that drive is beginning formatting. My name's Dave Andrews, and I've just showed you how to partition a hard drive."