Sunday, November 2, 2008

How To Partition a Hard Drive

I think a lot of people still don't know how to partition a hard drive as yet. So that is why I have created this post; to help you through the process and recommend an excellent tool for how to partition a hard drive.

Users of Windows 98 will remember using FDISK for all their partitioning needs. Back then a lot of people did not know how to partition a hard drive. In those days FDISK was perfect for how to partition a hard drive as hard drives were not that big. When I was buying my Pentium 3 the largest hard drive in the market was of 10 GB. FDISK would partition 10 GB without any problem. I also had FDISK and also knew how to start it up but when I actually did start up FDISK I did not know how to partition a hard drive.

Click Here to Download a Free Trial of EASEUS Partition Manager Professional Edition.

But as technology improved and we kept on getting larger hard drives such as 40 GB. Then in that case FDISk would take forever to partition the hard drive so FDISK was no longer the convenient option. Very soon how to partition a hard drive softwares and tools came to the market that made the process of partitioning very easy and very very fast. They also gave how to partition a hard drive tools a nice Graphical User Interface (GUI) or point and click interface, so that we dont have to remember all of those commands.

In Windows 98 days we would start our PC using the startup floppy and then enter commands such as "c:" and then "fdisk", this would take us to the fdisk menu. The menu was not at all user friendly and new users would usually get confused. But thanks to how to partition a hard drive tools even a complete beginner can partition his or her hard drive without any problem.

How To Partition a Hard Drive:

Almost all of the "how to partition a hard drive" tools have the same method but slightly different interface. I will explain the common method here and this will hopefully apply to all "how to partition a hard drive" tools.

The first step in your how to partition a hard drive tutorial is that you will have to boot up your system with the bootable cd that the software provides you with. Assuming you know how to boot up your system from your CD. If you don't know how to do this then let me know via the comments and I will help you out.

Now assuming that this is a completely new hard drive and there are no partitions in it already. But suppose there are partitions and you want to get rid of them then all you have to do is select each one of them one at a time and then press the delete icon in your partitioning tool. Now that we have no partitions either its new or you deleted the old partitions, In either case you sould see "unallocated space" written there in front of which you should see the maximum size of your hard drive.

So the next step in how to partition a hard drive is to create some partitions. Press the create icon and specify the size, type and format of your new partition. For windows you should select "Primary Partition" and "FAT32" filesystem or format. Repeat this process for the other partitions. But keep in mind that there should be only one primary partition.

The last step in your how to partition a hard drive is to select the primary partition as active (you can accomplish this by right clicking on the primary partition, selecting advanced and then select set active). The very last step will be to hit apply and you are done.

And there you have it, now you know how to partition a hard drive.

EASEUS Partition Manager Professional Edition - The Easiest Tool for Partitioning Your Hard Drive:

Now that you have read the how to partition a hard drive guide, you would be wondering which software or tool you should be using for this task. Well I recommend EASEUS Partition Manager, all the above steps of how to partition a hard drive apply to it and is without a doubt the easiest tool for the job.

  • Supports Windows Vista 32 and 64 bit.
  • Includes Windows Version and Linux Version together.
  • Creates a bootable CD/DVD to manage partitions easier and faster.
Click Here to Download a Free Trial of EASEUS Partition Manager Professional Edition.

The Above screenshot shows the Graphical User Interface of EASEUS Partition Manager Professional Edition to show that it is compatible with the how to partition a hard drive guide.