How To Partition Hard Drive Without Losing

By the time using your computer, you might have
wished to partition your hard drive. Perhaps, the
reason might be to dual boot or secure some
separate partition for backing up old or important
data. You might be guessing that I would suggest
you to download some tools. But it’s not like that,
I am not going to suggest you those old tricks
that says to back-up your data and place it in
separate storage device and partition it again and
again it to one of your partition.
In Windows 7, there is simple way to do it. Today
in this tutorial, I’ll be guiding you through the
each and every steps with screenshots.
Before starting note that,
- We can partition any drive, even a system drive
- We can do it only in Windows, Windows 7 and
Vista specifically
So let’s divide it.
Go to Start > Right click on My Computer and
choose Manage.
Disk Management Window will Pop-up, it may
take time to load it since it fetches for all the
hardware and system information in your PC.
After it’s fully loaded, go to Storage> Disk
management at the left sidebar. This is where
we’ll have all the information about storage
devices that are in our PC currently connected
and active.
At the right column all the storage media will be
listed with their basic information like File system
type, and status. Now choose the Volume that
you want to partition. Right Click on it and select
Shrink Volume option from menu.
As soon as you click on the Shrink Volume option,
system will search for available space in your
selected Disk Volume.
This will not take much longer than few seconds.
After querying, Shrink window will pop-up. This
is where you’ll have to specify the Volume for
next partition.
Look at the total size of available shrink space.
Below it, you’ll have to Enter the space to shrink.
You must make sure that the size is not below the
total size of space taken by files in that drive.
You can check the used space by right clicking
on the drive you are going to partition and choose
Properties.
Click on Shrink button after specifying the size to
shrink. The shrink size is for the value for the
partition where your old files will be contained
and remaining size will allocated for your next
partition.
But you’ll still not able to access this new drive.
You’ll have to format it and specify the drive letter
to access them. To do so, continue reading.
Right click on unallocated drive and choose New
Simple Volume option.
New Simple Volume Wizard Window will popup.
Click on Next button to continue.
In next window, you’ll have to specify the size for
your new volume. Set full size if you are satisfied
with two partitions; else divide it again for new
partition.
Next choose any drive letter from the available list
and click on Next button.
In next window, leave everything as default but
make sure it’s similar to the screen below:
Click on Finish window to complete the wizard.
If you’ve autoplay enabled in your computer,
then New Volume will be auto played for the first
and last time.
Go to my Computer to see your new drive ready.
With similar method you can also format your
empty drive to create multiple partitions.
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