Resize NTFS Partitions

Video Transcript

"I'm Jonathan Ayres with Network for Success and today we're going to talk about how to resize NFTS partitions. Now, what is a partition in the first place? And a partition is the location where you keep your information on a hard drive, when you get a brand new hard drive it doesn't have any partitions. When you install your operating system you then have a choice of making partitions or not making partitions. You could leave your hard drive as one entire big partition. Or you could chop it up into a number of smaller partitions and each one would be a separate storage container area for your data. And the drawbacks and various pluses and minuses that go along with that are complex but let's just first look at how you actually do something like partition or re-partition your hard drive with NTFS partitions. NTFS partitions refers strictly to Microsoft operating system products. So we're talking about Windows two thousand, Windows XP, Windows Vista. Now I'm going to show you in front of me here on this computer, we have a Windows XP computer and I have opened up the program called disk management, and disk management which resides under computer management shows how the hard drives are partitioned and allocated for space and it tells you how much of the space is being used. We'll take one example here on disk zero, let's look at disk zero. Disk zero shows to be a hundred and fifty gigabyte hard drive, that's its total size. Now, this has been partitioned into one drive called the C drive of forty gigabytes. The rest of the space on that hard drive is unused and unallocated. So it's at a hundred gigabytes of unused space. So what do I want to do with that space? Well let's say maybe I want to just use it and I want to make a partition there, all I'm going to do is come up and right click on that partition, that's unallocated and click on new partition. New partition will open up a wizard, and the wizard will say how do you want to partition? And you follow the steps through this and make a primary or extended partition, pick the size, click finish and it will allocate that unallocated space to a new partition. Can you do this if you don't have the space? No. It has to be unallocated space on your hard drive. Now let's take an example where you want to change the partitions on allocated space, how would you do that? The only way to do that folks is to buy a tool called Partition Magic and use it to change the partition size."