Say you've got a nice new machine, with a 100gb hard disk, efficiently running Windows XP, but what if, for one reason or another, you want to split that hard disk into multiple partitions.  What are some of the reasons you would want to create multiple partitions?  Well, how about a separate drive for your paging file, to aid system performance, a separate drive for all your media / photo's / movies, or, a separate drive, to run another operating system, in a dual boot environment.  Sound good?  How can you do it in XP?  Well, it's not the easiest thing to do...

  • Method 1: - Re-install XP (Using your bootable DVD) and partition on setup.
  • Method 2: - Use a third-party Partitioning tool, such as partition magic.

Well, looking at the first one - it's abit of a hassle, and what if you already have alot of work on there?  You will need to back it all up etc, taking valuable time and effort.  This is obviously assuming that you have the DVD of XP.  The second method would provide you with a feature-rich application, but, it's not free, and if you are only to use it once or twice, maybe the cost isn't quite justified.

So, how does this all change with Vista?

Well, although not as full featured as some third party partition management applications, in the Disk-Management snap-in, pictured below, users can shrink, extend, create, and format partitions. The new resizing features will allow users to shrink a single partition with unused space, and then create a new partition in the resulting free space, as well as extending a current partition if there is available free space after it.

DiskManagement

Compare this with the options you have in XP:

DiskManXP

And you can see the number of features has increased a great deal.

So, you've installed Vista, on your single-partition, but you've decided that you'd like to create another couple of partitions, one for your media, and one for your other data, keeping just your system files on the current partition.  All you have to do is click Shrink Volume, enter the details...

Shrink

and your unallocated space is created, where you can subsequently create your new volume with the New Volume Wizard, allocating size and choosing drive letter, or, you can extend an already existing volume.  You can split this space again, and again, to create your required partitions.

I think you'll agree, with the new enhancements to Windows Vista Disk Management, the wizard-driven shrinking and extending partitions is now easily accomplished. As always, when making changing to the partition structure, users should ensure that all important files and data are backed up.

 

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