Partitioning is the act or practice of dividing the storage space of a hard disk drive into separate data areas known as partitions.
The reasons for creating multi partitions on a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) usually surround grouping materials for neatness or security. Neatness can be solved far more easily with folders but security is best dealt with by partitioning the disk.
Your C: drive on your PC nearly always contains the Operating System and if anything goes wrong with it you may have to format the HDD with the result that all data will be lost. By creating a second partition you can move all your data (we are talking here of files, folders etc. created by a running program, or else downloaded or otherwise copied on to the PC) onto the second partition which will be unaffected by a format of the system disk.
For the purpose of this exercise we are going to use Easus Partition Master as it will cover operating systems which will not allow the resizing of current partitions on HDDs. I say this because Windows 7 will allow limited movement on partition sizes.
Upon starting the application we view the current situation. The C: drive can be seen and shows that it is a single usable partition of about 218GB. The other drive shown is a USB memory stick.
To begin we select this partition by simply clicking on it.
Next, right click on the highlighted area, and choose Resize/Move Partition.
Then using the right-hand slider,
drag the divider to the left until the sizes of the partitions are as wanted. Here I have kept the C: drive at about 100GB (Windows 7 can use up a lot of space) and leaving the remainder as free space. Click on OK and the main screen reappears but now showing the pending operation.
To continue select General, then Apply Changes.
Confirm that you wish to continue, read the warning that the PC will be rebooted and click on Yes. This is a major operation so there is a lot of work to do as the new partition is created. All the data and programs on the disk will be shunted into one area and as the PC cannot move data which is in use it needs to do this with Windows disabled.
The PC will reboot and the work commences. This could take some time depending upon the amount currently stored on the drive. When all operations are completed the PC reboots again and returns control to you.
Examine the drives via Windows Explorer and you will see the new reduced size of the C: drive.
The free space now created is not visible to us as it is just a dead space on the main drive and needs to be prepared for use. If we look in Windows Explorer we can see that drive C: is now reduced to about 100GB but that the space we freed off does not appear.
In order to be able to use this space it must be formatted.
Click on Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Double Click on Computer Management.
This is a tricky area of your PC and you should not fiddle with anything you do not understand.
On the left panel under Storage, click on Disk Management to expand the graphical display of the disks currently in or attached to your PC.
At the top of the page is a list of the drives in or attached to your PC and below is the actual graphical display which is easier to understand as it shows here which physical disks have been partitioned or divided into smaller chunks.
Disk 0 is the one of interest to us as it shows how the main fixed Hard Disk Drive (HDD) inside the PC has been partitioned. We have a Recovery Partition which would be used by an engineer to reinstall the system, a Reserved Area used by the system, the original System Area containing Windows and any installed software, and finally the area of unallocated space which we have just created and from which we will create the Data area.
Right click on the unallocated space, and choose New Simple Volume.
Accept the defaults on the next two dialogue boxes, then on the next box note the allocated drive letter. You should try to make this next in alphabetical order to the C: drive, or as close as possible, so if you still have removable drives plugged in which are using up drive letters, unplug them, click Back, then Next again in order to refresh the choices. Here we have D: as the selected drive letter which is what we want.
Click Next then select a Volume Name. We have chosen Data as the name for this new volume (Partition). Click Next after typing the Volume Label.
Now revisit the Windows Explorer screen to view the finished result and the PC shows that it has two HDDs of the sizes we stipulated during the Resize/Move operation.
To complete the process you may now move any data files from the C: drive to the D: drive and continue to use the PC as normal. You should use the drive as described in previous posts and keep your data in folders.
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