Bought a new Windows 7 PC or just formatted your laptop and have a fresh Windows 7 installation? It is a common scenario now-a-days to perform a clean reinstall of Windows due to ever increasing Malware infections. Unfortunately, you will have to partition hard drive once again after installing fresh copy of Windows.
You need not right away go for shopping a partition software. With Windows 7, it’s easier, safer, and free to do hard disk partition. Here is the process:
1. Login as Administrator of your PC.
2. Click Start –> right-click on “Computer” and choose “Manage”.
3. In the left pane of “Computer Management” window, click on “Disk Management” in “Storage” tree. Now in the right pane. you can see the partitions in your system. For example, we have a single 250GB hard disk partition “C” in which Windows 7 OS is installed. We would like to make around 100GB partition to the existing partition.
4. Click on the partition and then right-click on it and click “Shrink Volume”.
5. In the following dialog box, key in size of new partition you need in “Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB” field. In our example, we key in “100000” since we need around 100GB of partition. Windows will shrink our existing 250GB hard disk to around 150GB. This means at the end of this process we will be having “C” drive with 150GB and “E” (new partition) with 100GB space. Then click “Shrink” button.
6. Windows 7 will resize the partition and you can now see the resized partition and the new partition. Note that the new partition is shown as “Unallocated”. This partition is useless at this point. In order to use it for storing data, we need to format, assign a drive letter to it. Head to next step.
7. Click on the new “Unallocated” partition, right-click on it and choose “New Simple Volume”.
8. Follow “New Simple Volume Wizard”, click “Next”.
9. Specify size of volume that you need to format. In our case, we have around 100GB partition and would like to use the entire partition. Reducing value in “Simple volume size in MB” field would create another partition of unallocated size. Note that you can create another partition anytime. At this point if you only need 2 partition, leave default values and click “Next” button.
10. Specify your desired drive letter for the new partition. Else click next with default value.
11. Choose “Format this volume with the following settings” option. Select file system you need for the new partition. You have option to choose from NTFS and FAT file systems. Allocation unit size may be kept with “Default” value. Enter desired volume label for the partition. For example in our case, we name it as “MOVIES”. Click “Next” button.
12. Finally finish the partition process by clicking “Finish” button. In the Computer Management window, you can now see the new partition with status “Healthy”. In our scenario we have “MOVIES (E:) with 100GB (near to 100GB) NTFS File System”.
You are done. Open My Computer to see the new partition.
