Pc Maintenance: How To Partition Your Hard Drive

We all like a little order in our things. We don't leave our homes in a mess and we don't leave our closets disorderly. Naturally we don't want to leave our files and other data on our PC in a messy state. With this in mind, we should also learn how to keep our hard drive in order to keep it efficient. That's why it's useful to learn how to partition your hard drive. Making a partition on your hard drive isn't necessarily a pc tweak to make your computer faster, but this way you can keep your files organized and you'll be able to install a secondary operating system to the one that you already have.
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So if you have Windows XP you'll be able to run Mac or one of the other Linux distributions like Ubuntu. This is highly useful if you want to give other operating systems a try and you don't want to give up the one that you currently have. It works best if you want to try free operating systems like the Google Chrome OS (when it finally becomes available as a full OS) or the one of the Linux distributions. So as you can see, partitioning a hard drive is quite useful.

Before we partition your current hard drive, it's best to make sure that you have data backup because you have to erase the data that you already have on that partition. If you don't want to have to trouble yourself with data backup, you should do this with a new hard drive.

We begin by going to the start menu. Right click on the computer icon and select manage. A new Window will pop up. From the set of options available on the left side, select "Storage" and then select "Disk Management".

You'll now see all the partitions that you currently have. You should see the C and D for now. Generally, D has more space than C has so I suggest you use that. C normally holds the operating system you currently have so I suggest that you leave it alone. Set the amount of space that you want to allot it and then format that partition.

To install the new OS you'll need to use a third party application. Wired magazine suggests that you use free software like Gparted LiveCD. I you don't plan on installing a new OS then you're pretty much done. You can now use the new partitions and label them in any way that you like. You can keep any kind of file you like and you can even format the different drives.