Hard drive partitioning is a process in which a physical drive is divided into two or more sections called partitions. For example, you can divide a 500GB hard drive into two partitions of 250GB. This is most often required in case of upgrading you old hard drive or adding an additional drive to your system in order to increase its storage capacity. But how to partition your hard drive and is it really necessary. Well, actually your computer would work properly,regardless of whether the hard disk is partitioned or not, but the presence of multiple partitions will definitely make your life easier.

Is it really necessary to partition your hard drive?

Creating more than one partition has some advantages, most important of which is that you can install more than one operating system on a single hard drive. Another advantage is that you can store all your important files such as documents, music, videos and images in a partition separate from the operating system so if the system partition has something wrong (due to a virus or some other software problem), the other where your files are stored will remain intact. Thus if you ever need to reinstall Windows, an eventual reformatting of the operating system’s partition would not lead to data loss from other partitions.

Hard drive partitioning allows faster and more efficient disk maintenance. For example, it is much quicker to defragment a partitioned drive than a whole, non-partitioned drive because in most cases you will need to defragment only the system partition due to the fact it is most used by the operating system. Hard drive partitioning also increases system performance by reducing the time for indexing and searching files.

How to partition your hard drive?

Generally there are two ways to partition a hard drive. The first is to do this during installation of the operating system and the other one is to do this when it is already installed. Partitioning during the installation is required when replacing or upgrading an existing system disk by using the tools provided in the installation package but this
is a specific process which is different for each operating system and that makes its description in a single post almost impossible. On the other hand if you are installing an additional hard drive in a computer already having a working operating system, then you can choose between many software applications designed to manage disks and disk partitions. Most of them will let you not only to create and delete partitions, but also to resize them or convert their file system (e.g. from NTFS to FAT). However, if for some reason you can not install any third-party software then most likely you will need to manage your partitions using the built-in Windows disk manager. It has all the basic functions you need and works perfectly but before you start don’t forget to back up all your data in case something goes wrong. For the following example I will install an additional hard drive to my system, which as you can see is labeled as Disk1. This is a brand new device and therefore it contains only unallocated space, but if you have a second hand hard drive, then it might be already partitioned.

Important: When installing an additional hard drive to your system (no matter whether it is brand new or second hand), it won’t appear in the My computer window until you create a partition with a valid Windows file-system (e.g. FAT or NTFS) on it or in other words, drive containing only unallocated space will not be visible for the operating system.

Before we begin we must first start the built-in Windows disk manager. It is rarely used program that is part of the administrative tools of Windows and therefore it has no shortcut on the desktop or in start menu. Fortunately there are several different ways allowing to easily access this application.

Win XP.

1.  Go to START > Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Administrative tools > Computer management > Disk  Management

2. Go to START > Run, then type compmgmt.msc in the text field, press OK and select Disk Management.

3. Right click on the My computer icon and select Manage. Then click on Disk Management.

Windows 7.

1. Right click on the My computer icon and select Manage. Then click on Disk Management.

2. Go to START menu, then type compmgmt.msc in the searh field, press Enter and select Disk Management.