How to Partition a Laptop Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to partition a laptop hard drive. Let's go to the computer, which I'm using my laptop here, and on our desktop, let's just right click on "computer". If you don't have the "computer" icon on your desktop, it's under your start menu; you can right click on it there as well. Just right click on "computer", click on "manage". Now, you have to be an administrator for this, and it's going ask you for your permission to run the management; just say continue. Now, what we're interested in looking at in the computer management window is under "storage disk management". Just click on "disk management". As you can see, that's showing me all of the available disk that I have on my computer. I have a "C" drive, a "D" drive, and an "F" drive. My "C" drive is the laptop hard drive, and I happen to have twenty gigabytes, or so, of unallocated space on my "C" drive. If your laptop hard drive is already full, you're going to have to right click on your "C" and run a shrink volume, but we're not going to do that. We're just going to be partitioning this twenty gigabytes that I have available. To partition it, right click on it, and say "new simple volume". It's going to bring up your new simple volume wizard. It's going to ask you how much space you want available, and I want to use all twenty gigabytes, so that's twenty thousand mb's, or megabytes. It's then going to ask you what drive letter you want to give it; I'm going to call it drive "P", and say ok. It's going to ask you then what options you want to do when you format. The file system, it's important to use NTFS because that is Microsoft's newest version of their file system, but if you want to access this from a Macintosh or a Linux, you have to use FAT32. Let's give it a label as well, I'm just going to call it data. If you check perform a quick format, it will format faster, but it won't check the drive for problems. I don't want to that. For this demonstration, I'll have it do a quick format, but typically you want it to check the drive for problems. It's going to tell you that you are finishing, so just click finish. As you can see, my twenty gigs is now blue, and it is formatting. When it's done formatting, it's going to appear as a "P" drive under "My Computer". My name is Dave Andrews and I just showed you how to format your laptop hard drive."