Windows 7 - Partitioning your Drive(s)

[iPwn]

Partitioning your Drive​

This section will explain how to virtually partition out your harddrive so that you have not only your main drive (C: ) but you also have an additional Data drive. This will be useful in the ‘shared folders' and ‘backup' tutorials. First, however, we're going to skip ahead to do a defragmentation of the drive for the best results.

To accomplish this, Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, and then Disk Defragmenter. The built in windows defragmenter will work just fine for what we need it to do.

Click Analyze Disk – This will determine the amount of fragmentation. Since this tutorial is intended for new Windows installations, the fragmentation should be very minimal. If you're reading this tutorial and applying to an existing Windows 7 installation, then you may expect a higher fragmentation percentage and a longer wait time for defragmentation.

Next, Click Defragment Disk – Defragmenting a hard drive organizes the files in such a way that they are in the same physical location on the disk. What is fragmentation in the first place you ask? This will be explained in the “Defraggling” section, and yes, there is a reason I named it “Defraggling”.

Once the defragmentation is complete, continue on with this tutorial.

Next, we're going to partition out the Harddisk to make separate partitions.

Click on Start, right click on Computer and select “Manage”.

Double click on Storage.

Double click on Disk Management

C: will be selected by default. You should now see a screen similar to this.

(Disregard the size of my drive, this is all done in a virtual machine)

The bottom section of the window shows you the different partitions that are housed on the physical harddrive.

Right click on the C: Drive and then select “Shrink Volume”

This will change the size of drive C: making space available for the data drive that we will be creating. Now you should see a screen similar to this

For the amount of space you wish to shrink, if you plan on installing a large number of programs, then let's go with an 80GB Drive C:, if you don't plan on installing a large number of programs, then we can probably stick with a 60GB Drive C:, however the choice is up to you. If you really don't know what you want, a very comfortable number would be 100GB, this is ample room to expand your program lineup. How, though, do you get the correct number of MB to shrink?

1. Take the total number of available MB (represented by the line item “Total size before shrink in MB:”)
2. Subtract the total number of megabytes you wish drive C: to be changed to. How do you get a good number? Use a converter to determine the total number of megabytes that equal the desired size in Gigabytes.
3. Enter the result of your equation into the “Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB:” field.

Click Shrink when you have the correct amount input.

Note: If your drive is fragmented in such a way that you do not have the ability to shrink the drive to the desired size, then shrink the drive to a size that will be larger than the original drive C:

Notice that there is now a black section on Drive C: . This is no longer part of Drive C: but is now “unallocated” space. What we're going to do now is use the unallocated space to create a new virtual Volume or Drive.

Right click on the unallocated space and select “New Simple Volume”

Click Next

Enter the desired size of the new Drive in MB, the default will be the entire available space, which in this example, is exactly what we're going to do so go ahead and click Next

Now assign the drive letter you want the new drive to be. It will have a default letter and the letter of the drive makes no difference on system performance. Click Next

Now you should be presented a screen similar to this (With different options selected)

Name the drive whatever you would like, but make sure that you enable File and Folder compression.

Now click Next and you will be presented with the summary screen. Click Finish to start the creation of the Drive. It will take a few moments to format and properly setup the drive.

Congratulations, you have successfully partitioned out your drive. This will be beneficial when setting up backups and shared folders.

 

[JCB1]

thanks for the guide, Moved to software guides

 

[rul99]

Thank you for the guide. I have a question: I did partition the HD in my laptop using this guide. Can I also install Linux in this new partition?

 

[Terrance]

I've never used to make partition on my PC's Hard Drive...
But this info is quite helpful in this aspect...
Manny thanks for the guide...

 

[iPwn]

Thank you for the guide. I have a question: I did partition the HD in my laptop using this guide. Can I also install Linux in this new partition?

You can actually. When you insert the Linux CD and boot from it, it should display the two separate partitions.

*Note that if you formatted the partition in NTFS, Linux will need to reformat the partition to ext4. You also have the option of installing Linux inside Windows using a Wubi installer. If you choose to do a Wubi install, I would put it on the C: Drive so you also have access to the newly created Data drive.