Having only one partition on your hard drive is generally not a good idea. Unless you save all your data on a flash drive or external disk, the day Windows stops working you run the risk of losing all your files and personal data along the way.
To avoid having to recover all those lost files, the best you can do is create an additional partition. This way, you can use that partition only to store your important files and documents, and the day that Windows fails, you will only have to format the main partition, keeping all the data in the secondary partition safe.
How to create a new partition without deleting data (Windows 7/8/10/11)
If you want to create a new partition on the hard drive from a partition that already contains data, you can do it quite easily. The only requirement is that the partition you are going to work with uses the NTFS format.
You can see if the partition is formatted as NTFS by opening Windows Explorer and navigating to “This PC”, right-clicking on the partition and selecting “Properties”.
Partition in NTFS or FAT32?
If the partition is formatted as FAT32, you need to change the file system to NTFS. To do this,
- Type “cmd” in the Windows search engine,
- Select “Command Prompt -> Run as administrator”.
Next, run the following command in the terminal window, where “x” corresponds to the drive letter that is in FAT32 format and you want to partition:
convert x: /fs:ntfs
Before launching the command make sure to close all open programs, because if the partition is in use by another application you will see a warning message on the screen, and the conversion process could be complicated.
Create the new partition
Now that you have the partition in NTFS format, you should divide it to create a new partition.
- Press “ Win+R ” keys and execute the command “ diskmgmt.msc”. This will open the disk management panel.
- Locate the desired partition and right-click on it. Select “ Reduce Volume ”. This is a very delicate step: check at least twice that you have selected the correct partition.
- Now select the space you want to allocate to the new partition, and specify that data in megabytes in the “Size of space you want to reduce” section. Be sure to leave enough space left for the files that the partition already contains.
- When you have everything ready, click on “Reduce”.
Once the volume is reduced you will see that there is a new space on the disk that appears as “ Unallocated ”.
- Right-click on this free space and select “ New Simple Volume ”.
- Indicate the space you want to allocate to this new partition. By default, it selects the maximum free space available.
- Hit “Next” and assign a letter to this new drive.
- Click on “Finish”.
How to create a new partition using DISKPART
If you need to create more than 4 partitions on the hard drive then you will have to use the DISKPART commands. This is a Windows tool that does not have a graphical interface, so all actions are performed from a terminal window.
- Open a terminal window with administrator permissions as indicated above.
- Run the following commands:
- diskpart // this command will invoke the DISKPART utility
- list disk // show a list of all disks
- select disk X // where “X” corresponds to the number of the disk that appears in the list that we just loaded
- create partition primary size=5000 // creates a primary partition on the selected disk. Substitute 5000 for the space you want to allocate to your partition in MB.
Note: If you want to create an extended partition, please replace “primary” with “extended” in the above command.
- Lastly, assign a letter for the new partition with this command:
- Assign letter=Y // where “Y” will correspond to the letter we have chosen for the new unit.
- Exit // use this command to close the DISKPART utility.
