How to create a Partition for a Hard Drive in Windows 7 Using Built-in Software

Partitions are divisions for Storage Devices, Specifically for Hard Drives. This makes the Hard Drive take on two drive letters which makes it easier to manage, store and Protect data. It has been a long suggested practice to separate your documents into a different drive letter from the drive letter that has the operating system. This intends to prevent data loss in case the system crashes or a fatal error occurs in the operating system which forces you to format the drive.

There are many Programs out there that can partition your hard drives. One of them is Partition Assistant. But this article will only discuss how to partition using the tools in Windows 7.

To partition your hard drive, first type “Computer Management” in the start menu then hit enter. Then select Storage (double click it) then, double click Disk management. You can now see a list of storage devices including your hard drives. Right click the one that you want to partition then select shrink. You will see a dialog box you about sizes. The amount of space to shrink would be the size of the partition you want to create. Let’s say you want to create a 10000mb partition then, make the shrink size 10000mb. Click Shrink then wait.

What this does is Windows Shrinks the partition and frees up some space so that you can create another partition. After the Shrink, you can see a new section in the lower part of the computer management screen. The new section says unallocated. You need to format this. Right click on it then choose create partition. Follow the instructions that will appear then you now have a new drive letter.

When creating a partition, always remember to leave sufficient amount of free space in the volume or drive where the Windows installation is. Windows uses this free space for page file. If there is not enough space, you may encounter problems. I suggest you leave at least 5Gb of free space.