Everything You Need To Know About Hard Disk Drive Partitioning

Partitioning your hard disk can help you prevent and relieve all kinds of issues on your computer. You can speed up boot times if you partition your hard disk. And you can even make loading and opening files go much faster if you partition your hard disk as well. So how exactly do you partition your hard disk anyway? Fortunately, there are tools on Windows computers that can help you partition your disk space easily and quickly. This kind of tool on Windows is the Disk Management program, and it can help you get the most out of your hard disk. You can read on if you want to know more about hard disk drive partitioning.

What is partitioning a hard drive?

Disk partitioning your hard drive involves separating a single hard drive into multiple and independent components. The drive that your computer comes with is already probably partitioned into two disks. But most new or external hard drives that you purchase will come without any partitions at all.

You can think of a disk partition as a divided part of the real hard disk drive space.

It is necessary to partition a hard drive because, without a disk partition, the device cannot be read by your operating system. You will need a disk partition on the hard drive if you want some kind of way to write files onto an empty drive.

How can I partition my hard drive in Windows 7 without formatting?

Partitioning your hard drive in Windows 7 is actually really simple. And you would not even have to format your drive, so you can keep all of your existing data too.

1. Go to your Computer icon and then right click on it to select the Manage option. In this window, you can then select the Storage option, which you can then use to go into Disk Management tools.
2. Within disk management, you can see all of the drives that are on your system. You can then choose which ones should be partitioned. Right-click on those dives then the choose the Shrink Volume option.
3. When the drive is checked, a window will pop up which will indicate the total size of the drive. It will then show you the available space after the drive has been shrunk. You can choose the amount of space that can be shrunk, and that will be the available storage space for your partition.
4. Wait for the whole process to be completed and then when it is done you are shown the unallocated space that is left. You should select the New Simple Volume.
5. Within the New Simple Volume window, you can fill in the rest of the details of the newly created drive. Just choose a letter to assign to your newly partitioned drive. Be sure to select the NTFS file system option when you have chosen the new name for drive, you should be all done.

How do you partition an external hard drive?

1. First, connect your external HDD to your computer and then you can run diskmgmt.msc on your computer.
2. You can then right-click on the current disk partition on the HDD and then choose to delete it. You can also shrink it if you want to keep that existing partition.
3. There should be a Free Space that you can right click on the HDD and then choose the New Simple Volume Option.

3. Indicate the volume size for the disk partition that you want to create. It needs to be a smaller amount than the total storage space of the HDD.
4. Click on the Next option to indicate a letter to the partitioned drive. You can then choose the File System for your drive.
5. You are now done with the disk partition. You can repeat the whole process if you want to add more partitions to the external drive.

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