How To Partition Hard Drive Without Losing Data

By the time using your computer, you might have wished to partition your hard drive. Perhaps, the reason might be to dual boot or secure some separate partition for backing up old or important data. You might be guessing that I would suggest you to download some tools. But it’s not like that, I am not going to suggest you those old tricks that says to back-up your data and place it in separate storage device and partition it again and again it to one of your partition.

In Windows 7, there is simple way to do it. Today in this tutorial, I’ll be guiding you through the each and every steps with screenshots.

Before starting note that,

- We can partition any drive, even a system drive
- We can do it only in Windows, Windows 7 and Vista specifically

So let’s divide it.
Go to Start > Right click on My Computer and choose Manage.

Disk Management Window will Pop-up, it may take time to load it since it fetches for all the hardware and system information in your PC. After it’s fully loaded, go to Storage> Disk management at the left sidebar. This is where we’ll have all the information about storage devices that are in our PC currently connected and active.


At the right column all the storage media will be listed with their basic information like File system type, and status. Now choose the Volume that you want to partition. Right Click on it and select Shrink Volume option from menu.

As soon as you click on the Shrink Volume option, system will search for available space in your selected Disk Volume.

This will not take much longer than few seconds. After querying, Shrink window will pop-up. This is where you’ll have to specify the Volume for next partition.

Look at the total size of available shrink space. Below it, you’ll have to Enter the space to shrink.

You must make sure that the size is not below the total size of space taken by files in that drive.

You can check the used space by right clicking on the drive you are going to partition and choose Properties.

Click on Shrink button after specifying the size to shrink. The shrink size is for the value for the partition where your old files will be contained and remaining size will allocated for your next partition.

But you’ll still not able to access this new drive. You’ll have to format it and specify the drive letter to access them. To do so, continue reading.

Right click on unallocated drive and choose New Simple Volume option.

New Simple Volume Wizard Window will popup.

Click on Next button to continue.

In next window, you’ll have to specify the size for your new volume. Set full size if you are satisfied with two partitions; else divide it again for new partition.

Next choose any drive letter from the available list and click on Next button.

In next window, leave everything as default but make sure it’s similar to the screen below:

Click on Finish window to complete the wizard.

If you’ve autoplay enabled in your computer, then New Volume will be auto played for the first and last time.

Go to my Computer to see your new drive ready.

With similar method you can also format your empty drive to create multiple partitions.

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