How to Rearrange Your Hard Drive Partitions

Rearranging your hard drive partitions by changing the drive letters is quite easy. If you want to change drive D to drive E, let's say you have Windows XP, right click on the My Computer icon then click on Manage. Then on the left side panel, choose disk management. You should see all of your hard drive's partitions. The information includes their sizes, percent used, status and of course, their drive letter. If you want to change the drive letter, all you have to do is to right click the partition and click on Change Drive Letter and Paths.

Sounds really easy right? But remember that there is a certain risk involved. Be careful on clicking the other buttons on this window. If you've accidentally removed a partition, you will lose all of that partition's data. Also, you will notice that the C drive cannot be modified. The reason for this is that Windows stores boot information in the C drive by default.

Ideally, your Windows system and program files should also be in the C drive or your main drive. Changing the drive letter would make your programs inaccessible. Let's say you installed a word processor in drive C and if you are allowed to change it to another drive letter, your program will not run because it is set up to run on drive C. You'd have to run the setup program of that word processor again in order to use the software and you'd have to do it on every single program that you installed. You can also create new shortcuts but it's tedious especially if you have tens or hundreds of programs to access.

Now, let's say you have a 500 GB hard drive and you have 3 partitions. Drive C with 150 GB, drive D with 250 GB and drive E with 100 GB. If you want to switch the C drive with the D drive, you must do it the hard way. You have to remove both partitions. Make sure you back up your important files first (including drive E just to be sure) because those partitions will become inaccessible once deleted. Now when you're ready, create a 250 GB partition then create another one with the remaining 150 GB. What about the last hard drive partition?

You may face another dilemma here. Once you delete the first 2 partitions, for some reason, there is a chance that it will move up to become the main partition but not the C drive. If this happens, you can get yourself in a fix if you're not careful. Physically, that old partition is at the end of the hard drive and if you install windows there, it will use the partition that is at the beginning of the drive and it will set that new partition as drive C. The end result is, your Windows is on drive D but your boot information will still be in drive C.

I had a few instances before when drive D seemed to be the main partition so I installed Windows there. It became more disorganized as my music and video file partition became the C drive and boot information was stored there. Some programs default installation in C drives so my music and video partition also had program files in it. It's confusing and became much more cluttered.

So based on experience, it's much better to clear up every partition on your hard drive and carefully set your new partitions according to how you want it arranged. For this example, remove all the partitions of the 500 GB hard drive then choose 250 GB for the first partition, 150 GB for the second and then 100 GB for the last one. It will set the 250 GB partition as the C drive and the rest as drive D and E respectively.

One of the main reasons why you may need or want to change the main partition is when you just bought your computer. When you buy a computer, it usually has pre-configured settings and the computer shop's technician may set up your hard drive partitions in a way that you do not like. They do it this way so that when you buy the computer, you can immediately use it. Of course, you can always tell them beforehand that you'll set it up yourself if you wanted to.

Another reason why you may want to change or rearrange the drive partitions is if you've thought about reorganizing your files and want to segregate your files for easier access. Let's say you started to think that it would be much easier for you if your video files and audio files are located in one separate partition or your important data files in one small partition. Whichever the case is, you'd most likely want to reconfigure the drive partitions.

There you have it. There's an easy way and a hard way of arranging your hard drive's partitions. Just make sure that you've planned it well or else instead of getting more organized, your partitions and files can end up in a mess. Do not forget to backup your data just to be sure.

Source:
Wikipedia - Disk Partitioning
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_partitioning