How to partition a disk easiest - without third party software

HQuan · March 8, 2022

WARNING: I'm not respone for any damage cause by you doing wrong - not correct follow my guides. These guide is the most basic of Windows.

If you can see this then hooray, your eyes are saved from this post.

Partition a disk, without third party software. With pro, this is very basic thing. But with new, non-tech people, this is very mysterious, strange and magic woo woo like.

So, here's how to partition a disk.

0.5: Defrag the disk

" Shrink can only shrink up to where the last fragment of a file is located on the disk. So if you want to shrink a partition as much as possible, DEFRAGMENT the drive first, with whatever option is there to have the files packed as tight as possible. "

Spoiler

For this, I recommend you to use 3rd software.

- Download Piriform Defraggler or O&O Defrag (trial)

- Follow the instruction of the software to defrag the drive you want to partition.

OR, with no 3rd party software:

- Open "disk defragment" of Windows

- Select the drive you want to partition

- Press "Analyze"

- After the analyzing complete, press "Optimize"

1: Open disk managment

Spoiler

- Type in your search bar "partition" (if not work, type in "create and format hard disk partition" or "Microsoft Management Console"

- Open the result application.

- You will open a program with the title name "Microsoft Management Console"

2: Partition

Spoiler

- Select the drive you want to partition (take example, I will partition "8@2048@NTFS", I will right click on it on the top menu)

- Press "shrink volume"

- Enter the amount of the new partition you want in the 3rd box (that's Windows already highlighted for you)

Note: the amount of space is in MB not GB. 1GB = 1024MB. 10GB = 102400MB. 100GB = 1024000MB. More, just add "0" if the GB increase by 10.

-Press "Shrink"

3: Create a new volume

Spoiler

- Slide down to the drive you just partitioned, right click on the gray box

- Press "new simple volume"

-Press "Next"

- Press OK

- Press "next"

- Customize the new volume

- Press "Next"

- Press "Finish'

Wait after 1 - 99999 seconds, and your disk is complete! Partition for you!

I will put a video here soon. Thanks for reading.

HQuan · March 8, 2022

Here's full step without pictures:

(extra steps, for more juicy speed, do this)

- Download Piriform Defraggler or O&O Defrag (trial)

- Follow the instruction of the software to defrag the drive you want to partition.

OR, with no 3rd party software:

- Open "disk defragment" of Windows

- Select the drive you want to partition

- Press "Analyze"

- After the analyzing complete, press "Optimize"

(main steps)

- Open Microsoft Management Console (type in search bar "partition")

- At the top menu, right click on the drive want to partition

- Select "shrink"

- Type in the highlighted (3rd box) the amount of space of the new partition (in MB!)

- Select "shrink"

- Scroll down, right click on the black box (of the drive just shrinked)

- Press "create a new simple volume"

- Press "Next"

- Press OK

- Press "next"

- Customize the new volume

- Press "next"

- Press "finish"

mariushm · March 8, 2022

With one observation which is mentioned in the pictures but not in text :

Shrink can only shrink up to where the last fragment of a file is located on the disk. So if you want to shrink a partition as much as possible, DEFRAGMENT the drive first, with whatever option is there to have the files packed as tight as possible.

A lot of defragmenting software will leave a few empty sectors (a few KB or hundreds of KB) between files, the idea being that should that file be updated and expand by a few KB, then those few extra KB would be just appended to the end instead of being allocated somewhere randomly and resulting in file fragmentation.

I know for sure O&O Defrag (trial ware, but 30 day evaluation is enough to do this) has the option to defragment free space, where it compacts the files without leaving space between. I think Piriform Defraggler (freeware) may also have this feature.

I like O&O Defrag personally because it can be configured to move certain file types to certain locations on a drive. For example, if you have big mkv or mp4 video files (ex 8-50 GB movies / bluray backups) you can instruct the software to move them to the end of the drive where the speeds are slowest - but still several times faster than needed for a video player to sequentially read the files and play it full screen and enjoy the video. Then the rest of the drive especially the area where latency is smallest and transfers are fastest can be used for game executables, and other stuff that updates often.