And the best of all: It's all free! Thanks to Easeus for the free tool EASEUS Partition Master. Although, you may find serveral different editions from the Easeus homepage for the same purpose, the free Home Edition will take care of your re-partition need just fine.
While many people are well familiar with the term "re-partition", some others may wonder what it actually means, so here's a quick overview....
On many computers, especially pre-configured desktops and laptops, the hard drive is setup and configured with an operating system ("O/S") such as Windows, and it is allocated as one single partition (so called the "System drive" or "C drive"). However, many people find this setup inconvenient because of various reasons. One of them, and probably the most common reason is: They prefer to keep their user data separately, away from the operating system so that they don't loose all the user data when the system partition or Windows crash.
On the other hand, some other people just want to manage and configure their drives the way they like.
Re-partition the hard drive seems to be the right solution where users can resize their hard disks and create additional partitions even though an operating system has already been installed.
Some later versions of Windows such as Windows Vista and 7 come with a built-in feature called "Shrink Volume". You can try this out by going to Disk Management and right click on a drive, then select Shrink Volume. We are not going to discuss the details about this built-in feature here; however, one thing to note: As you try it out, you might find it very disappointed because of the limited "maxiumum" size you can shrink, it'll just kill your hope.
Note: - Supported Operating Systems for EASEUS Partition Master v8: Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 SP1 (32 bit & 64 bit)
Important: You will be altering your system drive and the operating system (Windows) by following the steps below. Proceed at your own risks.
To get started, first download a copy of EASEUS Partition Master v8.0.1 Home Edition (Free) here Or here.
- Install the Easeus tool then open it up the same way as you open any other program.
- On the main screen of the program, the bottom panel shows a
list of available physical disks. The top panel displays the current
partitions of the selected disk.
- Click to select the disk which you want to re-partition. As
you click, the top panel will refresh showing the availble partitions
for this drive.
- Right click on the partition which you want to resize. (You can right-click on the partition on either panel). Then select "Resize/Move Partition"
- At the Resize/Move Partition screen, double-check once again that you picked the right partition to resize. Then, adjust the "Partition Size" to change its size.
As you're adjusting this number, the partition shown at the bottom is also changing its size and a new Unallocated partition is created.
- Once you're happy with the new size, click "OK".
- Now exit the program. Upon the attempt to exit, you'll get a prompt to apply the changes and another prompt asking to reboot to execute the operation. Click "Yes" on both prompts. Windows will now restart.
- At this time, you just need to sit back and wait. However, if
you watch the screen, you'll notice that during Windows reboot, Easeus
Partition tool will kick on and perform the changes.
Once it's done, it will need to reboot a second time and then bring
you back the normal Windows desktop. (At this time, you can either use
Easeus or the Windows Disk Management tool to create
a new partition for the new unallocated space you just made.)
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