This is a continuation of my previous post where we discussed some of the basic principles of partitioning a hard drive and therefore in the next example we will try to perform this process on a real drive under Windows XP. What we need is a computer with installed and running Windows XP and of course an additional hard drive or at least a free (unallocated) space on the current drive. Important: whatever drive you use, be sure to back up all important data located on it as there is a risk of information loss.

Creating a primary partition.

After the Disk Management window opens you’ll see a list of all hard drives installed on your computer including all the partitions they contain. As you can see the different partitions are marked in different colors depending on their type.  To create a partition select a hard drive, then right click on the unallocated space (here is the place to mention that you can create a partition only from unallocated space) and select New partition.

After a few moments a New partition wizard will open. Press Next.

Here you can select what type of partition you want to create. In this example we’re going to create primary partition so select Primary and press Next.

In the next window, you must specify the size of the new partition. For my example I will create a partition with a size of 30000MB which is approximately 29.3 GB

The next thing you can do is to assign a dreve letter to your new partition. If you like, Windows can automatically select a drive letter which in this case will be the first available one.

You can leave everything else as default (drive letter, file system, allocation unit size, volume label, etc.).  One of the interesting options is “Perform a quick format” which by default is unchecked. Once selected it will accelerate the formatting of the new partition (time will be reduced to a few seconds), but this will disable the error checking function so I think it is better to leave it as is.

On the next window you can see a list of some of the most important parameters of your new partition and if you notice something wrong, you can go back and repeat the process.

Finally, click Finish and wait for the formatting process to complete. This may take some time depending on the partition size.

When it ‘s ready you should see a the inscription Healthy which means that your new partition is formatted and ready for use.