Steps or process on how to create Partitions?

Steps or process on how to create Partitions?

Hi Dwight,

It is always advantageous to have many partitions on your hard disk drive. Then it will be easier to find and organize your files in a proper manner. Also you can install your operating system to a partition and other data to relevant partitions. The advantage of that is, if you need to re-install your operating system you can format the operating system’s partition without losing the other data.

We create a partition, which means that we are acquiring some space from your hard disk to a specific purpose. We can give each partition a name and a drive letter. A partition has a file system to store its data. Here are the file systems which used by operating systems.

File Systems:

DOS	FAT16
Windows 95	FAT16
Windows 98	FAT32
Windows NT	NTFS Version 1.0
Windows 2000	NTFS / FAT32
Windows XP	NTFS Version 5.1/ FAT32
Windows Vista	NTFS Version 6.0
Windows 7	NTFS
Linux	EXT1/EXT2/EXT3/EXT4

So you need to format your partition with the relevant file system to operate.

Partition your Hard disk in DOS.

In MS DOS operating system, FDISK command is used to partition your hard disk drives. After you enter the command following 5 prompts will appear.

• Create DOS partition or logical DOS drive.
• Set active partition.
• Delete partition or logical disk drive.
• Display partition information.
• Change current fixed disk drive.

So enter choice 1 fro create new partition. In the following screen there are 3 options to choose.

• Create Primary DOS partition.
• Create Extended DOS partition.
• Create logical DOD Drive(S) in the extended DOS partition.

Before selecting that choice I would like to mention that a hard disk partition has for main types. Primary, Extended and Logical. A hard disk can only be partitioned into at most 4 primary partitions. Alternatively I would suggest having a 3 primary partitions and 1 extended partition. So then that extended partition can be divided into many logical partitions. But must remember the boot files remain on a primary partition. So from that screen you can select partition sizes and types according to your requirements. After finishing the partitioning you have to restart the computer.

Partition your Hard disk in Windows:

Disk partition in windows is rather easier than DOS. Windows has a special tool for that purpose called ‘Disk Management’. You can open disk management tool by right clicking my computer icon on the desktop -> select manage and select disk management from that screen.

This tool shows all the information you need to know about the hard disk. It will show the available partitions, their file systems. Also you can see the type of each partition such as dark blue for primary partitions, dark green for extended partitions, blue for logical partitions and green for free space. From right clicking the free space you can create new partitions. By right clicking an existing partition, you can delete, format and extend and change drive letter of a partition.

For most of the windows versions disk management tool has no major changes in the user interface. So if you are comfortable of using disk management tool in Windows XP you can do the partitioning in Windows 7 without any problems.