We see a lot of hard disks in the market today that come in large sizes. We see 80 gigabyte hard drives up to 160 gigabyte. That is quite a large storage capacity if you compare it to the old ones we have some years back and one thing you should be aware of is that the larger the storage, the risky it is as far as perhaps losing data once the hard disk crashes or breaks down.

The best way to go about it is to partition the hard drives into smaller parts. For example, you can partition an 80 gigabyte hard disk into 2 40 gigabytes or even 4 20 gigabyte drives. As you can see, even in smaller partitions, they are still big and normally for most operating systems like Windows Vista or Windows XP, the most you would need would be about 4 gigabyte at the most.

When it comes to installing software, you can install it on the other drive letters assigned. For example, you can install MS Office in drive D or an anti-virus software in drive E. This helps ensure that you are balancing the applications you are installing which in the end can save you the trouble of losing space.

For documents, you don’t have to always follow the usual My Documents on the C drive. You can configure it in a way that it is saved on the other drives. Or if you are lazy to configure, the beauty of partitioning is that you can easily transfer in between drives so that if crashes occur you can retrieve the files and transfer them via DOS or Windows.

Partitioning can be done on the setup menu during your first installation of Windows. Decide and then assign what partition size you want and then install from there.

If you’ve moved up from Windows 95 or 98 to Windows XP, one big thing you’ll notice is that creating new partitions doesn’t have to be done from the command line any more. Windows XP makes it easy to create a new partition using the graphical disk management tool. Here’s how:

1. Turn off your computer and install your new hard disk. It’s unlikely that you have any unpartitioned space on which to create a new partition on the drive already in the machine, so you’ll need to add a new drive. New drives typically don’t come preformatted, so you’ll need to create your own partitions and format them.

2. Start your computer and logon as an administrator. Click Start and then click the Run command. In the Open text box type: diskmgmt.msc and click OK. (more…)

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When I tried to install windows vista on my computer, the first decision I had to take was to partition the hard disk. I started looking for software on the Internet that can resize existing disk partition. I found some free software but none of them looked convincing enough to install and try on my computer. So I just decided to go on and install Windows Vista anyway. I had two partitions on my computer. The first partition was the C drive which had windows XP installed on it and the other partition was D drive which had all my data. There was no way I can install Windows Vista on C drive. So, I installed Windows Vista on D drive. After installing Windows Vista I went to the computer manager by right cliking on the “computer” icon and selecting and “Manage”. There you will find the Disk Management option. From there, select the D drive and choose “Shrink”. It will shrink the parition to all available space. This will take a long time to complete without any notification. So, don’t think Vista has hung. Let it finish and you will find D has been shrunk and there’s a new parition. (more…)

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