If you’re unhappy with a single partition in your vista system, and want to create a new partition without disturbing anything else, here is how to go about it.
- Must backup your data first.
- Create recovery discs of your system (if applicable).
- Make sure your laptops is at least 75% charged & plugged in the AC Power.
- Start -> Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management
You should see a screen similar to following
Say your C drive is 160 GB & you want to split it into 2 drives (technically, partitions). Right click on the C drive & choose ‘Shrink Volume’ option. System would take some time to query disk info & finally screen similar to following should appear
Note that ‘Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB’ value can be adjusted only to a limit. For instance logically, you cannot shrink your 160GB volume to 40GB if you’ve 50GB data on it. But apart from this physical limit, Vista calculates this space on some logic unknown to us at least (I would love to know if someone can tell me). Cause in almost new drives, we’ve seen in one instance, Vista giving away 70% of space & keeping only 30% for the drive, & for another system .. 70% of the drive was kept for operating system, & only 30% was allowed to be shrunk. In both cases, the drive was more than 80% free. Anyway, once you complete the ‘Shrink’, you’re left with unallocated space as in screenshot below.
You can now create one or more drives from this usable space. Right click on the Unallocated area & select ‘New Simple Volume…” as shown above. Next you should see the formatting dialog as shown below. For most users, leave the default settings, & press Next.
Windows would start formatting the new partition as shown below
Once formatted, your new drive should become available.
Beware, that this process should only be performed by someone who understands what is going on. As a wrong move can delete your partition (resulting in a non working machine) as well as loss of data.
Its works….so simple
Hasan Feroze
December 7th, 2008
Guyz! I want to create a partition a bit bigger. I mean around 15 GB. The way you have mentioned i did it once. But it only allocated 4GB. I looked for a software(Paragon) for partitioning. But it didnt work. Plz help.
Jehanzeb Malik
December 12th, 2008
Like mentioned in the post, we don’t know the basis on which Vista calculates the shrinking MBs. Try freeing up your hard drive (as much as possible) first, & then retry the above method.
Hope this helps.
admin
December 12th, 2008
also try a desi formula .. defragment your hard drive .. and try this shriking process again .. it might give you a few more GBs
usman
December 12th, 2008
Sometimes it happens that vista only allow some GB’s partition like Mr Jehanzeb Malik comment above. For me there are two ways to do further partition
You have to recover your system again right after making any partion.
Then it will allow you some more space,
if this method fails then you have to use any tool like ghost or partition magic etc
Otherwise don’t make any partition
John Daniel
December 26th, 2008
i have a problem wid my lap top.. volume bar appears on the screen sometimes n starts blinking with a sound from multimedia pannel as it is being increased or decreased manually..plz help
Abrar Anwar
March 30th, 2009
This a common problem in hp dv5 series. But the solution is very simple, you just only require to update your quick launch driver.
Restore your system to factory default image and then update your quick launch driver by downloading new driver from hp.com against your laptop model.
In this whole process keep that thing in mind that you are not suppose to download any quick launch driver. Only download your laptop driver i.e. hp dv5-1116em
John Daniel
March 31st, 2009