Partition a Drive in Windows Vista

No need for third party programs to partition hard drive today we will look at how to create partition in Vista for free.

Note: It’s always a good idea to backup before partitioning drive.

Click “Start” now point to “Computer” and right click on it, and select “Manage” from the menu. Now the “Computer Management” window will appear. Look at the menu to the left, click on the “Storage” pointer to drop down the menu and select “Disk Management”. It will show you the current partition.

The image below shows three partitions on my drive, the first two partitions are used for my Ubuntu Linux operating system. The last partition is used by Vista. You most likely only have this one partition on your drive.

Before we can create a partition we need to free up some space and we can do that by shrinking the current one. Right click on your existing partition and choose “Shrink Volume”.

Choose the amount of space you want for the new partition. For the sake of this article I will only do 18mb, remember these figures are in megabytes if you want 2 gigabytes for example you would enter “2048″ which equals to 2gb. Click “Shrink” when finished.

When Vista finishes creating the new partition right click on it and choose “New Simple Volume”

The Windows Wizard will pop up. You can select the size, then the drive letter, format the drive in “NTFS” and name the partition and hit “Next” it will give you a recap of everything click “Finish”.

After formatting your new partition in Vista will be ready. You can check it out by go to Start > Computers. How lovely is that.