Computer Repair and Networking Solutions: How to create partition in existing hard disk or external hard disk drive in WindowsXP

There are many ways to create partition. You can use DOS command utility FDISK or during Windows setup or with third party tools or using windows built-in COMPUTER MANAGEMENT tool after installing Windows. Partitioning hard disk drive using COMPUTER MANAGEMENT tool is very easy when compared to partitioning using FDISK.

For example: If you have 120GB hard disk drive and you have created only one partition of 40GB during Windows operating system installation. Remaining 80GB free space can be converted to two more partitions using COMPUTER MANAGEMENT tool.

Procedure:

Go to START and click on RUN to open RUN command window.
Type " compmgmt.msc " to open COMPUTER MANAGEMENT tool.

On the left side click on DISK MANAGEMENT option to view the hard disk partitions on the right side. You will see the partition list along with the file system of the partition, capacity, free space available and the health of the particular partition. Usually the partition in which operating system is installed will be named as HEALTHY (SYSTEM) under the STATUS column.

If you have multiple hard disk drives attached, you can see all attached hard disk along with partitions.

In the above image you can see two hard disk drives. One in internal hard disk which is fixed inside CPU and the other is external hard drive. Here the two hard disk drives are labeled as DISK 0, DISK 1.

The un-partitioned space will be labeled as FREE SPACE. Right-click on FREE SPACE partition and click on NEW LOGICAL DRIVE to open NEW PARTITION WIZARD.

Click NEXT to select PARTITION TYPE.

Click NEXT to specify partition size. Assign the partition size. The partition size is measured in MB (Megabytes). You can assign the maximum partition size if you are not creating any further partition.

Click NEXT to assign the partition drive letter and click NEXT to format the created partition.

You can format the partition using NTFS file system or FAT32 file system. If you are concerned about security, then format the partition using NTFS file system. Select QUICK FORMAT and click NEXT to go to final screen.