Month: December 2010

One of the problems that user are facing these days are having the single partition on your laptops. These days laptop come with only one drive with whole lot of space and (maybe)one with the backup partition containing recovery data to restore the laptop to its factory setting with all drivers (sometimes hidden). One way to create the partition would be to install the operating system again and create the partition then. But that would not be a sensible way to do it because it takes whole lot of time to do it and installing the OS means you need to install all the software and drivers that came along with your Laptop (preinstalled during the time of purchase) and in some cases drivers are hard to find. Does that mean you are stuck with only one drive? No definitely not. There are others ways around. You can partition your drive into multiple drives without the risk of data loss.

You can create multiple partition in windows 7 or vista based OS with inbuilt partition manager. All you have to do is type ?diskmgmt.msc? on the run window( type windows + r to open run). Right Click on your system partition and click Shrink Volume. Now shrink volume to your desired size. After you shrink the volume there will be unallocated space. Now right click that unallocated partition and select create new volume. Now you can create different size drives on your laptop.

 

The above procedure is for those who don?t want to use or install other software. But if you don?t mind installing other program to create partition( I recommend installing third party software because of the availability of other many functions i.e changing partition from fat to ntfs and so on) you can install a handy and free partition tool called Partition Wizard . This has more features than windows disk management utility and the great thing is its home edition is free to use.

Minitool Partition wizard home edition feature include:

• Support Windows 2000/XP/Vista/windows 7 (32 bit & 64 bit) operating system.
• Support RAID.
• Extend system partition to maximize computer performance.
• Manage the hard disk for substantial performance increase.
• Create, Delete and Format partitions with simple steps.
• Disk Copy to protect or transfer data.
• Support disk and partition size larger than 2 TB.
• Convert partition format from FAT to NTFS.
• Partition Copy: Copy the entire content of one hard disk to another.
• Copy Disk Wizard: Copy the entire hard disk to another without having to reinstall Windows.
• Disk Map – Visually demonstrate your disk/partition configuration; preview the changes before applying.
• Hide/unhide partition, set active partition, etc. – Change partition properties easily.
• Explore FAT/NTFS partition.
• Set partition as primary.
• Set partition as logical.
• Rebuild MBR.
• Disk Surface Test.
• Partition Surface Test.
• Change Partition Serial Number.
• Change Partition Type ID.
• Hot Extend Partition without reboot.

You can download and try it to create as many partition as you want. Make sure you read the warnings, documentation, help carefully before proceeding. Partitioning your hard disk is a serious task and may lead to loss of data when not used or done properly. Better to make copies of V.V.V important documents before proceeding.

Also keep in mind to keep your laptop or pc in continuous power supply the process once begun cannot be halted at the middle and causes the drive to loose data if there is a power failure at the process.