How to partition a hard drive on Windows 10

Partitioning a storage device such as the hard drive is the process of dividing the physical storage system; whether it's a hard drive or a solid-state drive (SSD), into smaller sections for the purpose of organizing  folders and files.
For this how-to we're going to demonstrate partitioning a 50GB from the local hard drive labeled (C:\) using the tool provided by Microsoft Windows 10, “Disk Management”.

Side note, the process of partitioning a storage is not unique to Microsoft Windows 10, if your storing data on computer, smartphone, tablet to gaming console the storage device  was partitioned and formatted one way or another. 

** Important ***
Before partitioning or modifying your storage device, MAKE SURE TO BACKUP YOUR IMPORTANT FOLDERS AND FILES.  


Step 1 - Open Disk Management tool

  • Right click on the Start or Start button
  • Select “Disk Management” tool


Step 2 – Partitioning

For this example I'm going to select the volume with the largest amount of space to create the partition from and in this case it will be volume C:
  • Right click on the volume.
  • Select “Shrink Volume...” from the drop down menu.



Windows 10 will take a few seconds to study the volume and if all goes well it will continue to  the next dialog box for partition configuration information.




Step 3 – Creating the partition size

This is impotent  “Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB”. This is where you tell the Disk Management tool how much to shrink the hard drive to create the new partition and the amount must be entered in MB:

Converting GB to MB: 

  • 50GB  * 1024 = 51200 MB
  • Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB = "51200"
  • Click Shrink.



After shrinking the volume to 50GB you should see something similar to the image below, a new 50GB partition with the label unallocated.



Step 4 – Formatting the new partition

Creating the partition is half the battle. The next step is to format the unallocated partition to a usable space and to do that we need to format the partition.

  • Select the new partition labeled “Unallocated”
  • Right click and select “New Simple Volume...”




Keep the default settings and click Next




“Assign Drive Letter or Path”, keep the default settings and click Next.




On the “Format Partition” dialog box:
keep default settings except for “Volume Label”.
Enter a name for the new partition, I called my new volume “testvolume” but you can call it anything you want.


Click Next




Summary of the partition settings.

- click Finish




Done




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