Let's face it, the casual computer user I qurantee you have a exorbitant amount of hard drive space that's not being used. Nowadays who downloads music or store an infinite amount of video files, unless of course you embroiled yourself in installing a bunch of useless applications onto your hard drive. We live in the era of streaming where your entire content of choice ( music and movies) is stored in some cloud somewhere. Needless to say, the days of storing an exuberant amount of files on your hard drive are over, leaving you with a great deal of unused storage space, so why not put all that empty space to use.
There is one course of action you take and that is divide up your hard drive, the technical term is called partition, which brings us to the topic of this episode, the proper way to partition your hard drive. There is really no need for third party software as there's a partitioning tool built right into your operating system which commonly call Disk Management.
I take it that by now you're either rocking Windows 7,8.1 or the newly minted Windows 10. All have the same disk management tool embedded into its OS.
Let's get started.....
Before we get started, here's two reasons why you should partition a hard drive. Partitining a hard drive will allow you to backup and store files, adding an extra source of backup. The other reason is power users like myself like to add more than one operating system on a single computer, partitioning a hard drive will make this possible.
Before we proceed into this project, before we engage in disk partition,I advise you to back up all of your content, or create a drive image. We do this why? Because, well shit happens. Improper partitioning of a hard drive you can cause you to lose data, so yes backup your stuff.
First thing we need to do is access your Disk Management tool to that's within your Windows OS. Easy access to it is to click Start and go to your Search charm, type partitions (with a greater emphasis on the letter "s")
The Disk Management program should and will come up. You want to shrink the existing partition, right click it and select Shrink Volume. This is where things can go a wrong if your not careful ( once again make sure you backup your data before engaging in shrinking the volume).
After you proceed in shrinking your hard drive, there could be a long wait time, a dialog box will appear asking you how much partition would you like to shrink? The default number will be the maximum number that's readily available.