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A new laptop or a desktop comes with a preloaded Operating System and other applications. Most of them come with Windows Vista. Generally the preloaded systems have two drives, the first one is where the Operating System is installed and the second one is the recovery drive. But what if the system crashes and you had kept all your data in the primary drive. It is always better to keep your files in a drive other than where the Operating System has been installed. You can probably format the entire hard disk and partition. But, there is a very simple method in Windows Vista to partition a drive without loosing any data.
Preparatory Steps
- Goto ‘Start–>Control Panel’.
- Click on ‘Classic View’ in the left pan.
- Open ‘Administrative Tools’ from the right pan.
- Open ‘Computer Management’ from the right pan.
- Windows Vista will prompt you to confirm. Click on ‘Continue’.
- Double click on ‘Storage’ and then on ‘Disk Management (Local)’
- You will be taken to ‘Computer Management’ screen. You can see the snapshot of your drives.
Shrink Volume
- Right click on the desired drive and select ‘Shrink Volume’.
- Enter the amount of space to be shrunk.
- Once it is done, you can find some unallocated space.
Create New Volume from Unallocated Space
- Right click on ‘Unallocated’ and select ‘New Simple Volume’.
- You will be taken to ‘New Simple Volume Wizard’ window.
- Enter volume size and click next to continue.
- You can choose to select a drive letter for the newly created drive
- Select the following options and click next to continue.
‘Format this volume with the following settings:’
File system as ‘NTFS’
Check ‘Perform a quick format’
- Click finish to complete the process.
However there are limitations in using this. E.g. You find that you have around 200 GB free space but you could shrink only 50 GB. Read my other post to solve this shrink volume limitation.
http://www.techwhiz.in/2009/03/solution-to-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problem/
For any query please send email to saurabh(at)techwhiz(dot)in