Partitioning your hard drive with Windows 7 - a guide
With Windows 7 you can partition your hard drive without separate programs. Microsoft offers a preinstalled tool with which you can divide your hard drive. You can find out exactly how this works in this practical tip.
Preparation: shrink the hard drive under Windows 7
To partition your hard drive, you must first shrink an existing partition:
- To do this, start the disk management. You can access it via the [System and Security] category of the Control Panel. Select the item [Administration] and then [Computer Management]. Now click on the entry [Disk management]. Alternatively, you can also enter the following command in the Windows search: "Create and partition hard disk partitions".
- Right-click on the desired drive. Select the [Reduce] option and wait until the system has prepared the hard disk.
- In the new window, enter the size by which you want your standard partition to be reduced. You can only reduce this to the extent that there is free memory available. However, Windows automatically calculates the maximum value.
Create new partitions with Windows 7
After a short processing time, Windows reduced the size of your hard disk. The truncated memory is shown as "not allocated". You can now create the new partition from this:
- Right-click on the unallocated memory and select the entry [New simple volume] (see screenshot).
- A setup wizard opens. Here you can determine the size, the drive letter and the file system of the partition. If you want to create multiple partitions, you should reduce the size accordingly. With a click on [Finish] Windows creates the new partition.
