Partitioning HardDisks – A Tutorial
This post is for my friend – Faraz, who called me up and asked me about this. So here it is.
Why Partition?
Let us imagine a scenario in which you only one partition (C:\) on your PC. And you have everything on it – all your Mp3s, movies and other documents.
The problems with a single partition are many – your OS can get corrupted, a virus which can’t be removed (yes!), a root-kit or some other problem which is forcing you to format your hard-disk. In such a case, you will lose your all data or you will be forced to backup folder-by-folder to another media – which is a tidy process itself.
This is where partitioning comes in. You have different partitions for everything. One for the OS, the other for the data and someother for your music collection.
In this way, you can safely reinstall your OS – and preserve your data.
How To?
The most common partitioning tool is Partition Magic by Norton, though it is paid (expensive)
I recommend an open source alternative (as usual) called GParted which is based on the Linux kernel. It is fast, easy and FREE.
Go over to http://gparted.sourceforge.net and download the ISO (30 MB, fits on a biz-CD). Burn it to a CD and then boot your PC from the GParted Live CD. It will allow you to create, move or resize your partitions.
Common filesystems :
Windows – FAT, FAT32 and NTFS
Linux – ext2, swap
BTW, found a very good blog related to daily health problems. I suggest you go over and read it! Health Blog
Thanks, but don’t we have a chance to do it when we first install Windows?
Anyways, nice tool, now I can mess my harddrives pretty often!
[SИ]
August 14, 2006 at 4:46 am
@SN:
No actually. Windows won’t detect your ext3 or swap partitions. And of course Windows won’t install GRUB or LILO for you.
And you can’t resize the partitions too!
For starters, practise running Gparted inside a Virtual Machine. That way you can get more familiar with it.
Sukhbir
September 13, 2006 at 1:40 pm
well dude…what i think there is no software required to be downloaded if you have windowsxp bootable disk…its too easy to use…
and now if you are using vista…than u can do that job going in disk management…and u can shrink the drive…
RISHI
February 27, 2009 at 5:48 am