So why do we need to partition our drives? It can be for a variation for reasons, keeping things organized, creating a backup and recovery partition or just somewhere to put all the files you don’t want cluttering up your OS install drive. We all want that part of the drive set aside for a certain group of files (ya filthy animals!).
Let’s get to it then, how do we do set it up? I have made a video showing you how you can accomplish this on Windows. You can also continue reading to see my step by step instructions.
First thing is first, we need to make sure we have enough space on the drive we want to partition, it’s pretty simple to check that, first thing we do is head down to Cortana and type “Admin” and select “Administrative Tools” and then onto “Computer Management” then on the left hand side under “Storage” we want to select “disk management” it will take a couple of seconds to get the information it needs from your drives.
At the top we will see our drives connected to the PC, including any USB flash drives and hard drives you have connected. Select the drive you want, in my case it’s the “C” drive.
Looking down we see our disks displayed in a visual format, along with everything the drive is assigned to do inside the OS. Right click on the drive and select “Shrink Volume.” It will take a few minutes to figure out how much you’re able to shrink.
Now we are presented with this screen, lot’s of numbers here, it’s cool. The one we want to concentrate on is “Total size after shrink in MB” this is how big the current partition will be after we shrink it, above that – we have “Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB” this is how big the new partition will be, it’s done in MBs so, if you want a 2GB partition, you would type in 2000 – simple.
Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB
Once we have found a decent size for the new partition, hit “Shrink” it may seem like the computer has frozen, don’t worry it hasn’t – try to reframe from using the computer at this point as it’s working on your hard drive, last thing you want to do is confuse it and kill your partition, it doesn’t happen but, better to be safe the sorry.
Once it is done, you can see that suddenly our hard drive now has a black box that’s marked “Unallocated” this is our fresh new partition waiting for us to format it. Right click the BLACK UNALLOCATED space box and click “New simple volume” now we have the wizard to name and format our new partition.
Hit next, we then get to specify the volume size. It should be the size we shrunk from the first partition earlier, if that’s all good, hit next again. You can now choose a drive letter, this doesn’t matter too much. Be creative here if you want, in my case I’ll be boring and leave it at “E” and click next. Now we have 3 options to play with here, File System, Allocation unit size and Volume label, depending on what you want to use the drive for, you can change the file system, leave the allocation unit size as Default and you can call it whatever you so desire.
I will be calling it – Backup, below the Volume label box you should have a checkbox with “Perform a quick format” next to it, if you’re in a rush, by all means do a quick format, as it’s a fresh partition, a normal format wouldn’t really do much here, so we can leave that ticked, press next, check everything is in order in the text box and hit finish.
The PC will now spend a few seconds getting your new partition ready. Once it’s all done, you will find that the black box has disappeared and now has your volume name, drive letter and size. We’re done in this screen now, let’s head into “Explorer” and see if our new partition is showing up, if all is well, we should now have our new partition, easy as that. Now go fill it with whatever your heart desires, ya naughty beasts!
That’s pretty much it! Easy stuff. Let us know if you found this useful, I’m sure it will help a lot of you!
Further reading: Microsoft, Windows 10