Partitioning your Hard Drive in Windows 7 Without Formatting the Whole Drive

Partitioning your Hard Drive in Windows 7 Without Formatting the Whole Drive

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This Article explains how to Partition your Hard Drive in Windows 7

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The Windows 7 Disk Management tool provides a simple interface for managing partitions and volumes.

By following the steps below, you can create a new partition on your disk.

1. Click on Start and then right-click on Computer another menu opens and then you click on the Manageoption.

2. In the Computer Management window click on Storage and then go to Disk Management.

3. This will give you a view of all the drives present in your system.

4. From these select the one that you want to partition. Then right-click on the selected drive and select the option Shrink Volume.

5. The system queries the drive

6. After the system queries the drive, a new window will open in which the size of the drive before shrink will be displayed and the available shrink space. In the next line you can enter the amount of space you want to shrink and this will be the size of the new partition.

NOTE: The space you enter must be within the limit of the available space displayed in the example above.

7. After entering the values click on the option Shrink and wait for the process to complete. The time taken will vary depending upon the size of the disk and the space to be shrunk. Once the operation is completed a window appears showing unallocated space. Right-click on the unallocated space and select the optionNew Simple Volume.

8. The New Simple Volume Wizard window will open up. Go through the wizard and fill in the values required. Usually the value needed to enter is the same one that you entered as the volume to be shrunk.

9. The newly created drive needs a letter to be assigned to it. Pick a letter of your choice.

10. A Format Partition page will appear and in it make sure that the File System selected is NTFS. You can then enter a name for your drive and then click on Next.

11. After completion, a summary window will be displayed on which you can click on Finish.
    You have now partitioned the Hard Drive in Windows 7 without formatting the whole drive and without the use of any 3rd party software.