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Wednesday, February 23, 2011

How and Why to Partition Hard Drive?

By Mark Osborne


Disk partition, splitting one physical hard drive into several independent volumes--will be able to reduce all kinds of computer-related troubles, and because of the Disk Management utility incorporated with Windows 7 and Vista, it is easy to execute the work without expensive third-party tools.

A great number of PCs come from the manufacturer along with a single partition on their hard drive, which means that it shows up as one drive in the Computer window (as C:, usually). However , saving your data, applications, and operating system on a single partition can be dangerous because, if something happens to the partition's index file (the file that shows your computer where the various pieces of your data are placed), your computer won't be allowed to boot up off that drive--and in case you boot up with a recovery disc or external drive, you won't be able to access the rest of your data.

Partition hard drive generally declares your computer to deal with portions of that drive as separate entities. If you keep your system and apps on a partition separate from your data (documents, music, video, and the like), the data will be simpler to back up (because your backup utility won't bother to copy the system and apps, which you can reinstall from the discs or redownload from an online source). Additionally, you'll be less likely to lose your data in an accident; and if you ever have to reformat and reinstall Windows, you won't have to be worried about rebuilding your data backups.

Users with complicated hard-drive configurations, RAID arrays, or the Windows XP operating system will likely need more-powerful partition manager than Microsoft's Disk Management tool--Aomei Partition Assistant is a good place to start.

When you've cleared the specified space, it will show up in the Disk Management window as Unallocated Space. Right-click this entry, choose New Simple Volume, and allow the resulting wizard help you through the remaing steps of the process. Typically, you have to format the new partition as NTFS; and unless you're using this partition for archiving purposes, you won't need to enable file and folder compression for the whole drive. (If you choose to enable compression later, you can do it easily enough: In the Disk Management tool, right-click the partition and select Properties, Compress this drive to save space.)




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