Dividing a hard drive into windows 10 partitions. How to partition a hard drive

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In any operating system (especially Windows), it is advisable to have more than one partition on your hard drive. This is convenient both for storing information and for more rational PC administration. For example, in the event of an OS failure or the need to format main section, the rest will keep your documents intact.

How to partition a disk on an installed Windows 10?

This method is suitable if the operating system is already installed and is working normally, but you decide that the disk needs another partition. You can safely “bite off” it using standard built-in tools of the OS itself. To do this, click on “Start” right click and find the “Disk Management” item. If you prefer to use commands, press Win+R and enter diskmgmt.msc, the same window will open. All sections available in the system will be presented here with their detailed description. Volumes that do not have a letter assigned should not be used; they are reserved by the computer to store bootloader information. Select any other logical partition, right-click on it and select the “Shrink volume” line. If it shrinks system partition, that is, the one on which Win 10 is installed, do not rush to take all the space from it. It is advisable to leave 10 to 15 GB for various needs, such as useful software, logs, temporary files, swap files, and so on. After compression, an unallocated area will appear in the partition table, which can be easily used to create a new partition or increase the size of existing ones. Right-click on the unmarked area and select “Create Volume”. In the menu that appears, specify the volume size, letter, formatting settings and click “Next”.

Creating partitions during installation on Windows 10

Mark up HDD no less easy when installing a new OS, especially if there is no other data on the media. This happens at the stage following the introduction of the activation key, during the “Custom installation”. Here the installer will prompt you to specify a partition or select an unallocated area. If the hard drive is formatted or has not yet been used, there will be no problems. Otherwise, important data should be transferred to another drive, since the selected partition of the hard drive will have to be formatted. To create from existing section two or more, delete it, and then create it again by clicking the “Create” button in the installer menu. The same button will help you create a volume from an unallocated area.

You can create partitions on your computer using the appropriate software, For example free utilities Aomei Partition Assistant Free, Minitool Partition Wizard Free or any others. Before manipulating disk space It is highly advisable to save critical information from your computer in a safe place. This will protect you from any breakdowns and surprises. It is also noteworthy that in all current versions Windows process Hard drive partitioning is as similar as possible. Therefore, this article will help you not only in cases with Windows 10.

In this short article I step by step I'll tell you with pictures, how to partition a hard drive in Windows 10. Finding programs on the Internet that can do this will not be difficult. However, in my opinion, there is no need to use often dubious third-party programs when the Windows 10 operating system itself has a built-in ability to divide the hard drive into several partitions. That is, we will consider how to partition a hard drive using built-in tools in Windows 10 itself.

This method Suitable not only for Windows 10, but also for “seven” and “eight”.

Attention! It is highly advisable to perform defragmentation before dividing an existing hard disk partition. This will free up more space for the new partition.

Step 1. Open the built-in Disk Management utility

In order to divide your hard drive into several partitions, you need to open the built-in Disk Management utility. There are two ways to do this. Option #1 is only suitable for Windows 10 Option No. 2 - for almost everyone previous versions this operating system.

Option #1

In Windows 10, RIGHT-click on the menu “ Start" and select item 7 " Disk management».

Option No. 2

IN search bar From the Start menu, type “Control Panel” (number 1), and then open it with a mouse click (number 2).

In the window that opens, select and click on the “System and Security” item.

A new window opens. In it we go down and in the “Administration” item, click on the sub-item “Creating and formatting a hard drive”.

We are presented with the Disk Management utility itself.

Step 2: Shrink the volume and free up space to create a new partition in Windows 10

In order to create in the Disk Management utility new section hard drive, first you need to “pinch off” space for it from an already existing partition.

In the picture I presented, there are already two partitions C and D on the hard drive. Let's assume that I want to create a third partition. To do this, I select section D, which has more free space and right-click on its name with the right mouse button.

Note! In the Windows operating system, a single physical hard drive can contain no more than 4 sections, including system ones (for example, Recovery Partition).

An explorer window appears, in which I select “Shrink Volume”.

It’s worth going into a little more detail about why exactly compress. The fact is that in order to create a new partition, you first need to find free space for it somewhere. We get it by compressing the space on an existing volume. Section D in my case is a donor for creating a new section.

After this, the message “The volume is being polled to determine the available space for compression. Wait...". Polling a volume can last from several seconds to several tens of minutes. Here you will have to wait for some time.

When the system finishes polling the volume, a window will appear where in the “Size of compressed volume” column you can specify how much space you want to pinch off from your donor disk to create free space for now.

It will not be possible to take more space for a new partition than indicated. In my case, the ceiling is 78880 MB - a little more than 77 GB.

I'll put 51200 MB. This is exactly 50 gigabytes for the new partition. They can be used, for example, to install Windows 10 on a new partition next to the already existing Windows 7.

After you click "Compress" for some time, you will not see any result. The only thing that will tell you that the compression process is underway is the rotating blue circle, which appears when you hover over the utility window.

You will know that compression has occurred when a black bar with unallocated space appears at the bottom of the utility window (for me it’s 50 GB).

So we have freed up space to create a new partition on the hard drive in Windows 10. Now we’ll figure out how to organize the unallocated space and turn it into a full-fledged partition of our hard drive.

Step 3. Create a hard disk partition from unallocated space

In order to turn our unallocated space into a full-fledged hard drive partition, you need to click on the “Unallocated” inscription with the right mouse button and select “Create a simple volume”.

The “Create Simple Volume Wizard” will open. Click the “Next” button there. A window appears in which we can specify the size of our volume (hard disk partition). Here we can change nothing and click next.

We can change it if we want, for example, to create two new partitions from the freed unallocated space.

After this, we have the opportunity to choose for our hard drive partition Latin letter, by which it will be designated. I already have two drives C and D, I will call the third one F. Select and click “Next”.

In the next step, we will be asked to format our new partition. I'm leaving everything here as default.

After that, wait for “Done”.

Then a few more seconds or minutes our section is formatted and that’s it. A new hard drive partition has been created in Windows 10.

As you can see, I wanted to create a partition of exactly 50GB, but I ended up with 49.9 gigabytes. A small amount of compressed space was taken by Windows for system needs.

Now on this section, for example, you can install Windows 10 next to Windows 7 .

If for some reason you need to merge hard drive partitions back together in Windows 10, then I also have an article on this topic with step by step instructions and pictures: How to merge hard drive partitions in Windows 10 .

P.S.: Unfortunately, the above method in some, quite few cases causes Windows users 10 certain difficulties. The scale of the problems that arise became clear to me thanks to the comments located below on this page. Apparently, sometimes the operating system from Microsoft “plays it safe” and does not allow us to separate what we need from the existing hard drive partition free space. In some cases, dividing a volume into two is not possible at all due to supposed lack of space. Also, the Disk Management utility built into the OS may sometimes not allow you to merge some partitions of one hard drive. It was to solve these problems that I began to look for another option that would allow me to manage hard drive in Windows 10 using third-party, but most reliable and safe developments. Found. For those who have encountered such problems, I wrote an article “

Greetings to all of you in the next issue! Conditional separation of hard disk into two partitions C and D - this is what almost every user is used to, especially experienced users. The first disk is intended primarily for recording the OS and programs with which the user works.

The second one is intended primarily for storing times personal files. This partitioning of the device is very convenient, since if it is necessary to reinstall the OS, only the data from drive C is erased from the computer. In the material, we will pay attention to the question of how to split the hard drive into an even larger number of partitions, which will allow you to distribute and organize your files, as well as improve their safety.

Features of separation hard drive to partitions in Windows 10

So, in what cases might it be necessary? breaking hard disk?

The first time you may need to partition a hard drive is when purchasing a new device. When you buy a computer, the hard drive on it usually has one common partition. Recording the OS on one partition of the hard drive is neither rational nor safe, so it is recommended that immediately after purchasing a computer, divide the hard drive into partitions.

The second case when partitioning a hard drive may be necessary is the need to organize files stored on the computer: music, documents, photos. If all this data is stored in specific sections of the hard drive, and not in folders, then their security will increase.

It is important to know ! In this article we will look at how to partition a hard drive different ways. There are enough of these methods, so let’s analyze each option and then choose the most optimal one..

Partitioning a hard drive using Windows 10 tools

Initially, we will pay attention to the question of how to divide a hard drive into partitions when there is already a working OS with two disks C and D. Let's add another partition to these disks, which will store important photos. To break a hard drive you will not need to use third-party software, so the algorithm of actions will be as follows:

The process begins with the user needing to stand on Windows icon on the desktop with the mouse arrow, then right-click to open a pop-up window. In this window, select “Disk Management” as shown below.

This is the easiest way to call this option, but you can do this using the “Run” command by holding down two “Win + R” buttons at the same time, and then in the window that opens enter the command to English language: diskmgmt.msc.

After this, information about all available partitions on the computer will appear in the window that opens. Here you can find out the size of each partition, system type, load. In the lower part, in the form of rectangles, you can estimate the ratio of the sizes of each section.

Before you start partitioning, you need to free up some space. To do this, you can use partition D. It is this disk that we will divide into two partitions. In order to shrink disk D, you need to right-click on it, and then select the “Shrink Volume...” command, as shown below.

After selecting this command, a window will open where you should carefully specify the volume of the partition to be compressed. The information in this window is indicated in MB. IN in this case Let’s compress up to 10 GB by writing the value 10,000 MB in the “Size of compressed space” cell.

After this, the compression procedure begins, but no process progress bar will appear. The compression procedure takes about 3-5 minutes, so you need to wait a little.

Let's start creating a new section. To do this, right-click on the space that appears and select “Create simple volume”.

The creation wizard window will appear simple volumes, where you need to agree with the system by clicking the “Next” button. The Volume Creation Wizard will ask you to specify the volume that will be allocated for the new partition. You can indicate the entire volume, which is indicated above under the title “ Maximum size" The main thing is that the specified value does not exceed this value.

Now the system will definitely ask you to indicate the name of the future volume in the form of a letter. According to the alphabet, this will be the letter F, but the user can specify any letter.

After this, you will need to specify the file system type. Of course, the file system will be NTFS, and in the “Volume Label” section you simply need to enter the volume name.

As you can see, the procedure is quite simple, but it is necessary to take into account the fact that you should not compress the disk to the limit. This will affect its functioning for the worse.

Partitioning a disk using special applications

To divide your hard drive into partitions, you can use special applications. These applications include:

Acronic Disk Director;

Minitool Partition Wizard Free;

Aomei Partition Assistant.

There are other applications, but it is better to choose one of the proposed ones. Some of them are paid, but you can use an application with a demo version, which is Acronic Disk Director. Exactly by example this application Let's look at how you can divide a disk into partitions.

Initially, you need to download the application by downloading it from the official website, and then install it on your computer. After installing the file, you will need to launch the application, after which the following window will appear.

After launching the application, you will need to right-click on the partition, and then select “Split Volume”, as shown in the screenshot above.

Using the application slider, you can resize the two new partitions.

In order for the changes to take effect, you will need to click the button called “Apply pending operations,” which is highlighted in the screenshot below with a red frame.

The changes made will be applied, and the selected section will be divided into two parts. If separation is carried out system disk, then for the changes made to take effect you will simply need to restart the computer.

This application is quite easy to use, but its most important advantage is the presence of a Russian-language version.

Disk partitioning during Windows 10 installation

You can also partition a physical disk during clean install Windows 10 OS. This method is suitable primarily for that category of users who purchased a clean computer and are going to carry out partitioning during the installation of the OS. If you carry out separation in this way when files are stored on the computer, then during the markup process all information will be erased. This is important to consider before choosing this option.

If the user decides that this option suitable for it, then the algorithm of actions will be as follows:

First, the Windows 10 OS installation process starts. How this is done can be read in more detail on the website. Let's start with the following window appearing during the installation process.

It is in this window that you can add as many sections as necessary. To perform partitioning, you must remove the existing disks. How this can be done is shown in the photo below.

After deleting all existing partitions, an entry called “Unallocated Disk Space” will appear. This entry can also be seen during OS installation if you purchased new computer. To create a section, select “Create”.

In the next window you need to specify the size of the logical disk. Volumes should be indicated depending on the overall size of the hard drive. Since a 60 GB hard drive is selected for the example, we will create a C drive with a capacity of 40 GB, although for normal operation Windows 10 OS requires at least 80 GB.

After clicking the “Apply” button, a warning window will appear that to ensure correct operation need to create additional sections. You just need to agree. After this, a window will appear with our created 40 GB partition. Now all that remains is to use the unallocated space, for which we use the “Create” button again.

The cell with the volume of the future volume will be automatically filled. After creating the disk, you will need to format it. To do this, select the appropriate disk, and then click on the “Format” item. We agree that the system warns about the loss of all data. If you do not format the disks, the system will experience failures and errors, so this procedure is mandatory.

After formatting the disks, you can continue further installation of the OS. After installation is complete and Windows startup you can see that the disks that were created during the installation phase actually appeared in the “This PC” folder.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that dividing a hard drive into volumes is not as difficult as it might initially seem. All that is needed to achieve the final goal is to decide on the methodology and study each step. The risk of errors is minimal, but it is better to practice on a computer where it is not stored important information in one copy. It is believed that the most favorable way to partition a disk is to use third party applications. At the same time, the specialist is told that The best way to partition a hard drive is a procedure performed during OS installation.

The Windows 10 operating system allows you to create sections of hard disk using standard utilities or through third party programs. This separation allows you to store data, games and other files separately from the system. As a result, you will be able to reinstall the OS without deleting all the data stored on the second partition. Let's figure out how to create a D drive on Windows 10 in different ways.

If your computer has a hard drive with enough memory, you can divide it into several local disks and use at your own discretion.

Remember that to install OS Windows 10 you must leave at least 30GB of free space. Based on this rule, divide the space on your PC hard drive.

So, Microsoft offers users the following methods for dividing a hard drive into partitions:

by using standard utility;
on the command line;
when installing an operating system on a PC;
through third party programs.

If you have not yet started installing the OS on a laptop or computer, then you have the opportunity to divide the disk into partitions before starting to work with the system. Let's look at each method separately.

Installation separation

After you have loaded the installation menu from the USB flash drive with ISO way, you must perform the following steps:

Click on the second button in the window.

You will see a display of all connected hard drives. The list contains all created volumes. You can merge them, restore them, format them, divide them, or distribute space between them as you wish. Click on the “Create” button.

Specify the desired size and click on the “Apply” button. It is important that the volume of the partition does not exceed the amount of unallocated space on the disk.

Next, the installation application will prompt you to allocate space for the backup area. If you have unallocated space, then you can create another volume by specifying the entire remaining volume.

This is how drive D is created when installing the operating system.

This option is not suitable for everyone, since it can only be used once. It also does not have a visual display of volume in the form of bars or graphs.

Now let's look at all the methods that are relevant for dividing a hard drive from under the interface of the OS itself.

Standard utility available for Windows 10 Pro (x32-bit/x64-bit). You can open it in the following ways:

Right-click on the “Start” icon on the taskbar and find the “Disk Management” item in the menu.

Launch the Run application and enter the command “diskmgmt.msc”. To run with administrator rights, use the combination Ctrl + Shift + Enter.

This method is very simple and will not take you much time:

In the main program window you will see a list of all volumes (1) and all connected drives (2).

If you do not have enough space to create partition D, then you can delete the unnecessary one network drive. Make sure there is no information on it that is important to you. Right-click on the section and select “Delete Volume”.

You can also reduce the volume. To do this, right-click on the OS disk and select “Shrink Volume”.

Enter the size in MB and click on “Compress”.

The specified amount will be added to the unallocated space. This is what can be added to a future section. Right-click on the unallocated space and select Create Simple Volume.

On the first screen of the wizard, simply click Next.

Specify the desired volume of the future volume D.

Select the desired drive letter and click Next. You can also leave a section unchecked by selecting the checked item.

Now complete the basic settings: select file system, cluster size and name.

To begin the procedure, click on the “Finish” button.

In this way, you can connect or split multiple volumes using the Disk Management utility. Let's look at a few useful functions of this application.

Additional features

Using a standard utility from Microsoft, you can also rename an existing volume to drive D:

Right-click on the required section and select the marked line from the menu.

In the window, select the “Change...” button.

Select a letter from the list and click OK.

To change the drive letter you will need to restart your computer.

The utility also allows you to format individual logical volumes:

Right click on to the right one and select Format.

Specify new label, file system and cluster size, then select the formatting type and start the procedure with the “OK” button.

After this you will see a completely free partition. It can be divided into new volumes, merged with another partition, etc.

Creating a virtual volume:

Press top panel"Action" and select the marked item.

Specify the location of the future virtual hard drive. Exactly at specified folder you can find it and turn it on. Next, enter the size and format. Each format is accompanied by a description.

Finally, click on “OK”.

Command line

Microsoft's operating system allows you to perform most procedures without using GUI. In order to mark a new partition via the command line, you must follow the instructions provided:

Open Command Prompt through the Run application. Enter the command “cmd” and run the program as administrator using Ctrl keys+ Shift + Enter .

Now enter the commands “diskpart”, “list volume”, “select volume N” (the letter N is the number of the volume from which partition D will be created). After entering each command, press Enter.

Next, enter “shrink desired=volume in megabytes”.

Now enter the command “select disk M” (partition number). Then you need to successively apply the commands “create partition primary”, “format fs=ntfs quik”, “assign letter=D”, “exit”.

By using command line partitions are also merged or restored. However, this will require other commands.

Third party software

Let's look at one of the popular utilities that allows you to split, reset and merge partitions - Aomei Partition Assistant Standard. It can be downloaded and installed from the official website of the developers.

After installation, the application will open via a shortcut on the desktop. In the main window you will see an interface that closely resembles Disk Management:

To create a new partition D, you must complete the following steps:

First create an unoccupied area if you don't have one. To do this, click on the unnecessary volume and select “Delete partition”.

Now right-click on the unallocated space and click on “Create Partition”.

Use the slider or a separate field to select the size of the future volume and click OK.

You can also split one of the partitions to create a subkey D:

Right-click on the selected hard drive and select “Partition partition”.

Use the slider to set the size of the new subsection and click OK.

Conclusion

Using the methods described, you can create a separate volume for storing games or movies. This way you will separate the system partition and be able to reinstall the OS without losing personal files during formatting.

Video

Watch the video, which clearly shows all the steps described in the instructions from the article. If you encounter any difficulties, you can ask for help in the comments.