Partitioning your hard drive will be necessary to organize your files in a better way. Just having a single partition where you installed your Windows 10 might be a big risk of losing them. Let’s say, you ran into some problems and you want to reinstall Windows. All you can do is erasing the entire partition to install a fresh copy of the operating system. So, unless you remove your hard drive from the computer and copy all the files manually to some other storage media, you are probably going to lose all of them.
If you have multiple partitions where you separately stored your data, things are much easier. You are only going to lose those files you stored in your Desktop, or Users folder assuming that you did not copy anything to the C:\ drive.
In addition to this, having separate partitions can be very useful to neatly organize all your data. So, if you have any storage device whether it is an SSD or an HDD larger than 240GB, it is a good idea to split your partitions. In this guide, we are going to take a look at the steps required for that.
If you don’t know what you are doing, do not try to split and partition your hard drive manually. It can result in corrupted data, missing files, or even the entire storage getting erased. So, continue with caution and carefully follow the steps.
Before you start
- Be sure to choose the correct drive from the available drives as noted in Step 7.
- Do not play with other partitions, you might end up destroying your data.
- Do not create too many partitions with very little disk space. It is not like folders. You can always use folders inside the partitions to organize your data further.
- While formatting the partition as noted in Step 15, you might have to wait for a little file for the partition to be formatted and ready to use.
Steps to Create a New Partition in Windows 10
You can skip steps 1-5 just by typing “computer management” in the search box and directly opening it.
- Type Control Panel in the search box near the Start menu.
- Click on the Control Panel option that shows up.
- In the control panel, click on the System and Security option. If you cannot see that, make sure that the “View by:” is selected as “Category”.
- Go to the Administrative Tools at the very bottom.
- Then simply click on the Computer Management shortcut.
- In the left sidebar, click on the Disk Management option under Storage.
- If there is any Unallocated space on your hard drive, it will be shown in the black color next to your storage. Keep in mind that, if there are multiple hard drives connected, be sure to identify the correct one.
- Right-click on the Unallocated region.
- Then choose New Simple Volume from the menu. It will open the New Simple Volume wizard.
- Select Next.
- You can type the size of the new volume to your choice if needed. Type in MBs.
- Click Next.
- Choose a drive letter of your choice.
- Then click Next.
- In the next step, you have two options. Either you can format it right away or choose to do it later. If you are planning to start using the drive, simply click on Next. If you want to format it later and leave it like that, choose “Do not format this volume” and then click Next.
- Finally, just click Finish after reviewing the changes.
That’s it. You have successfully created a new partition in Windows 10 and you can start copying files to it.