How to Partition a Hard Drive

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to partition a hard drive. When you have a hard drive, you break it up in a multiple partitions so that it can hold data. These typically shows up in your computer as your C drive, your D drive and so on. We're going to partition this external drive that I have and let's go to the computer to get that going. To partition the drive, let's click on start, find my computer in this list, just right click on my computer and select manage. This is your computer management screen. Find in this list under storage, disk management. As you can see I have two disks that's currently connected to my computer. Disk 0 is the hard drive that's actually inside my computer and disk 1 is the external drive that I've hooked up by USB. My C drive is currently located on the hard drive in the computer. And I have another partition for the E drive that's on this drive. In order to partition this drive, you must first have an allocated space. As you can see I have 62.84 gigs of an allocated space. To partition that area, let's right click in there and say new partition. This opens up the new partition wizard. Click next. We're going to select primary partition. You can only have so many primary partitions per disk, but we're doing fine and under that limits; so let's go primary partition. Here you select the partition size. It defaults to the entire size of your free space. I'm going to limit that down to about 15,000 megabytes. To do gigabytes, you can, it's, you can generally however many gigabytes you want, multiply it by a thousand and that would be how many megabytes you need. So select next. It's going to ask you what drive letter we want to give this new drive. I'm going to label with F, but as you can see, we can choose any drive letter. When we partition this drive, it's going to ask us the file system that we want to use. The default is FAT 32 which is old technology, so we want to change this to NTFS which is Microsoft's new file system. Click next and then click finish to partition your drive. As you can see the F drive has appeared and if I go to my computer, I see an F disk. It's that easy to partition your hard drive in Windows. My name is Dave Andrews and I just showed you how to partition a hard drive."