Partitioning your hard drive in Windows Vista

[narangz]

Partitioning your hard drive in Windows Vista

By Rajbir Singh [via Techies Realm]

I’ve been asked by many of my friends about partitioning their computer’s hard disk drive. The question is how to partition it & which application is to be used. This question is also asked on most of the forums particularly by new notebook owners. Most of the new notebooks come with Windows Vista pre-installed. Therefore the first question I ask them is which Operating System are they using & if it’s Windows Vista, which is in most cases, I tell them they do not need any third party application for partitioning. You need not spend your hard earned cash anymore on any application just to partition your hard disk drive.

How to create a new partition in Windows Vista:

1. Right click ‘Computer’ icon on your desktop or in Start menu & click ‘Manage’.



2. Enter the Administrator’s credentials in the UAC prompt.

3. The Computer Management Window will open. Click Disk Management on the left panel.



4. Right click on the partition from which you want to create another partition & select ‘Shrink Volume’.



5. Enter the shrink size.



6. The selected drive will be shrinked & free space will now be shown in the Computer Management window. You can create as many partitions as you wish.



7. Right click the Free Space & select ‘New Simple Volume’.



8. The New Simple Volume Wizard will now appear. Click ‘Next’.



9. In the next window enter the desired partition/volume size, if you want to create multiple partitions & click ‘Next’. If you want a single partition just click ‘Next’.



10. In the next window assign the drive letter or, if you are not sure, leave it as it is & click ‘Next’.



11. Set the file system to FAT32 or NTFS, Enter the label if desired, select ‘Quick Format’, in the next window, and click ‘Next’.



12. Click ‘Finish’ in the next window to finish the New Simple Volume Wizard.



13. The new partition is now created & shown in Computer Management window.





You can now access the new partition in the Computer.

Wasn’t that really awesome? It’s simple & you need not pay a single penny to create a new partition! Your comments are most welcome.

Happy Computing!

[BBThumbHealer]

I knew this but anyways , thnx for posting coz it can be really helpful for newbies out here !

[nsbindra]

Thanx for posting.

[Krazzy Warrior]

Thanks for sharing.

[pushkaraj]

Never knew about this shrink thing in Vista. Thanx for the info

[narangz]

Originally Posted by BBThumbHealer

I knew this but anyways , thnx for posting coz it can be really helpful for newbies out here !

Many of experienced people do not know all the features of Windows.

Originally Posted by nsbindra

Thanx for posting.

Originally Posted by KoolKid

Thanks for sharing.

Thank you

Originally Posted by pushkaraj

Never knew about this shrink thing in Vista. Thanx for the info

Yes. That's why I wrote this. Not all the people know about that.

[BBThumbHealer]

Originally Posted by narangz

Many of experienced people do not know all the features of Windows.

r u pointing in the direction of sarcasm ?

[narangz]

^^No Sir.

[the.kaushik]

Help me pls.. when i click on finish of the step 12 i get an error "No enough disk space available".I kept c drive 135GB and the raw drive was 89Gb.. any idea.. i tried restarting but no use!

[narangz]

How much free space(Step 6) did you create after shrinking? What partition size do you want?

[Abhishek Dwivedi]

nice tut...but the wrst part of it is that is ur hard disk goes out-of-order n u need to reformate it, den all the partitions get formatted...

[narangz]

Err? Out of order?

[anandk]

Originally Posted by the.kaushik

when i click on finish of the step 12 i get an error "No enough disk space available".

If you get the message : There is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this operation.

Most new computers with OEM Vista pre-installs come with 4 partitions. Hard disks configured as basic disks are limited to 4 primary partitions or 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition and multiple logical drives. And as such, if you try to shrink the OS partition, you may find that you cannot create a 5th partition due to this limit.

There could be two possible solutions for this issue:
1) As the disk pre-configured by OEM may have conflicts with disk management tool in Windows Vista, you should try some 3rd party tools like Auslogics Freeware Defrag, to repartition the disk.
2) You may try to delete a less important partition created already and merge the space together to create a new partition with proper drive letter.
Deleting the partitions created by the OEM is often not possible due to the way the OEMs configure the partitions. Therefore the option then is to extend the operating system partition back to the original size to regain use of the unallocated space. If additional storage is needed, consider adding an external USB hard disk.

[Ponmayilal]

I already have three primary partitions and the extended partition with two logical drives, all populated..I want to convert one primary partition into a logical partition and then readjust the logical drive sizes.How do I go about?

If I remember correct, when I created the partitions when installing the OS (Vista Home Premium), the setup gave me no option to create the primary or logical partitions to my liking.It went on to create three primary partitions and then two logical partitions in the rest of the extended partition.I would have been happy to create only two primary partitions and the rest into logical drives in the extended partition.Is there a way now to achieve the same using the Disk Management?

I think I was stumped trying to do that and gave up.

[Abhishek Dwivedi]

Originally Posted by narangz

Err? Out of order?

lol...i mean if ne thing goes wrng...

[tusarks]

Dear friends , the simple steps written is well known .. but what to do if snapshots or pagefiles limit ur shrinking size .. I have a vista preinstalled lenovo PC with 160 gb drive . want to create 4 partitions , but size of available shrink space is only about 46Gb . Total preinstalled data is of size around 12 gb , still it is not allowing me to shrink 100Gb .. The comment below in the dilogue box says "size of avalable shrink space can be restricted if snapshots or pagefiles are enabled on the volume " but does not guide how to overcome such situation .. Please , if any body can, write some guidelines addressing the issue .. Thank you

[narangz]

hey there!
http://techiesrealm.com/blog/2008/04...windows-vista/

check out comments under the post for your problem

[andrewlsz]

Thanks for the tip,and is there also an option where we can merge two partition into one

[dude1x2]

After doing all this I get a massage that says that you have reached the max no of partitions(The message is not exactly like this!!!)...Plz check whether someone is also getting the same message............

[naveen_reloaded]

how to do it in dell laptop where they have restricted to only 4 partition,

please help me in this regard...

i shrunk but i wasnt able to format..

help me..

[sonkumonku]

tnx dude nice post

[illusionist]

Hey i bought a new hd of Segate 1TB now i've installed it in my pc and ti is working properly bt the thing is that now i want to create a partition in that hd and i m not getting it...
In disk management it is showing me "Simple Volume" (with a mustard color icon) and when i right click the volume it shows me these options - "Open, Explore, Change Drive Letter and Paths, Delete Volume, Properties, Help"..
Now can any 1 tell me that how to create partition in that hd... Pls help...

[celldweller1591]

Nice post ^^ but i prefer partitioning using Gparted via Ubuntu . It is very advanced and gives the option to create linux as well as windows partitons .Shrinking volume sometimes create issues as it requires 75 %+ of free disk space .I did it in my frnds lappy and after that i had to recover Vista as i shriked C:\ drive with 72% or so free disk space .

@illusionist : Delete the volume and right click and click add new , put the size,format it to Ntfs and proceed. Remember to make all your partitions as logical as there is a limit of 4 Primary partitions. Dont get wound up in that . Unallocated space will appear if you go beyond the limit of primary partitions while creating them.

[ramprasad]

Originally Posted by pushkaraj

Never knew about this shrink thing in Vista. Thanx for the info

Me toooo....
Thanks narangz for the tut