How To : Partition your computer's hard drive without formatting

Many a times, the new laptops which come with Windows 7 pre-installed, offer no partition. There is a huge C drive which houses Windows system files. So it becomes a little difficult to partition the hard drive. It is recommended to store your important data such as documents and pictures on a different partition, so they can be safe even if the OS needs to be re-installed due to some failure or virus attack.

Luckily, Windows 7 sports a feature called as Disk Management, which lets you modify the hard drives. It is, although, hidden deep into the settings and not directly accessible through Control Panel. Let us see how to split the hard disk to a new partition.

Step 1 : Firstly, press Start on your Windows 7 machine, and type "Computer Management" in the search bar at the bottom. In the list that appears in Search Results, click on the program "Computer Management". A new window will open.

Step 2 : Click on the option "Disk Management" (highlighted in the above image).

Step 3: Right-click on the drive that you wish to split. Select "Shrink Volume". A dialog box will appear which asks the amount of megabytes by which to shrink the drive.

Step 4 : Select a size you wish, which should be less than the free space left in that drive.

Step 5: After the drive is shrunk, there appears an "Un-allocated Space". Right click on it and select "New simple volume". Fill up the dialog box appropriately and a new partition will be created.