You should know a few things before we continue:

• Windows Home Premium 32 bit requires 16gb of space if partitioning for this
• Windows Home Premium 64 bit requires 20gb of space.
• HDD stands for Hard-Disk Drive. For the less technical savy, this is the disk that holds all of your data.
• mb stands for megabyte (1000 kilobytes)
• gb stands for gigabyte (1000 megabytes)

Creating a partition can be useful in many ways, some of those include:

• Separating your operating system from your main HDD. This allows you to back-up the "data" specific partition at much quicker rates.
• Keep frequently used files near each other (For faster load times)
• Isolate and protect files to make it easier to replace corrupted files.
• You could install a second operating system to try, if you wanted to. You could either dual-boot the operating systems, or just run one at a time.

Step 1. Open up Disk Management

Click the Windows start button, and type in "fdisk", then hit enter.



Step 2. Disk Management Program Window

This is the program that should open.



Step 3. Select the drive you wish to partition.

All of your partitions will be displayed on the disk management screen, as shown above. You want to pick one that you will lower the size of, to be able to create another drive. In most cases, this will be your C Drive.

Step 4. Setting the Partition

After you have chosen which drive you wish to partition, you will now want to right click that drives' name in the top section of disk management. Then click "Shrink Volume".

Step 5. Shrinking the size of your drive.

You will now see a window showing you the current size of your HDD, and the maximum space you can shrink. It is advisable that you do not shrink the maximum amount you can. Only shrink enough to create a new partition of the size you wish.

Remember that 1000mb (1,000 megabytes) is equal to 1gb (1 gigabyte).



Step 6. Creating a new partition.

Once you have decided on the amount of space you need for your new drive, enter that in the text field, and click "shrink". The amount of time this takes is contingent upon the amount of space you have requested. The more amount of space you have requested, the longer it will take. Do not interrupt this process once it has started. You may damage your partition's index file, which could cause data corruption, loss of data, etc. While this is recoverable, it may take hours of frustration. Do not interrupt this process once it has started.

Once it is finished, you will see a new space that has the amount you shrunk followed by the world "unallocated". Right click this area and select "New Simple Volume".

Step 8. Setup Wizard

You will now have a setup wizard appear. Fill in the size of the partition you just did, and select a label to your drive (a letter). The letter does not matter, as long as it's not already in use (such as C).




On the next screen, be sure "File System" is "NTFS" and name your volume whatever you want or whatever you're using it for



Congratulations on creating a new partition!

Thanks to Bill05 for the previous version of this guide.