How to Partition Your Hard Drive

Partitioning a hard drive is the process of dividing a single hard drive to create multiple, separate hard drives. There are several reasons and advantages of partitioning a hard drive. The most common reason people partition hard disks is to enhance a PC's performance by creating smaller file systems, which are much more efficient. Partitioned disks also enable you to boot more than one operating system on your PC with partitioned disks. You may, for example, have both Windows and Linux installed on your computer, and you can then choose which one to boot into when you power up. Partitioning a hard drive can also be used to protect files by isolating them on the separate partitioned disk.

How to Partition your Hard Drive

Step# 1
Determine how much Hard Drive Space is available
* Go to My Computer and right-click on the C: drive (or whichever letter drive denotes your hard drive).
* Click Properties on the drop-down menu that appears. This will display how much available free space you have.

It is very important to ensure that you have an ample amount of space on your hard drive before you partition it. Allow at least 2 gigabytes so that your operating system and other necessary system files can fit on one hard disk partition.

Step# 2
Run the FDISK program
Now that you have made sure you have enough disk space, you can create a partitioned disk. Click Start and then Run.

On the Run window, type "FDISK" in the text field. A command prompt will now appear with five menu options:

You can either enter "1" to create a DOS partition or Logical DOS Drive; "2" to create extended DOS; "3" to delete partition or Logical DOS drive; "4" to display partition information; or "5" to change current fixed disk drive.

For our purposes, we shall type "2" to create a disk partition, and press Enter. You will then, type in "N" when prompted to use maximum available disk space.

You will then be asked to allocate the amount of disk space for the partitioned drive. Enter the desired amount of disk space you want to allocate for your partitioned drive. Remember to leave at least two gigabytes for your operating system.

Once you have entered the amount of disk space the partitioned drive will receive, you should have successfully created another hard disk drive. You may repeat the steps as much as desired for multiple disk partitions.

Press Esc to exit the partition command. Now you have to format each of your newly created partitions to erase any data contained in the drives.