No need for third party programs to partition hard drive today we will look at how to create partition in Vista for free.
Note: It’s always a good idea to backup before partitioning drive.
Click “Start” now point to “Computer” and right click on it, and select “Manage” from the menu. Now the “Computer Management” window will appear. Look at the menu to the left, click on the “Storage” pointer to drop down the menu and select “Disk Management”. It will show you the current partition.
The image below shows three partitions on my drive, the first two partitions are used for my Ubuntu Linux operating system. The last partition is used by Vista. You most likely only have this one partition on your drive.
Before we can create a partition we need to free up some space and we can do that by shrinking the current one. Right click on your existing partition and choose “Shrink Volume”.
Choose the amount of space you want for the new partition. For the sake of this article I will only do 18mb, remember these figures are in megabytes if you want 2 gigabytes for example you would enter “2048” which equals to 2gb. Click “Shrink” when finished.
When Vista finishes creating the new partition right click on it and choose “New Simple Volume”
The Windows Wizard will pop up. You can select the size, then the drive letter, format the drive in “NTFS” and name the partition and hit “Next” it will give you a recap of everything click “Finish”.
After formatting your new partition in Vista will be ready. You can check it out by go to Start > Computers. How lovely is that.
I have Vista Ultimate 64 bit installed on a sata riad0 array. Would the re-partitioning method outlined above work without causing an unrecoverable error on this type of array?
my hard drive has 320gb what is the best partition for it.
Thank you. Worked great. Now I can run Ubuntu. 🙂
i do all of this,but when i cleack on finish button,an error has eccoure : “you cannot create a new volume in this unallocated space because the disk already contains maximum number of partition .”
i have only two partition :(( please help me.
I have a Gateway Model DX4300 with AMD X2 Athlon 7750 Dual-Core Processor, 640GB hard drive, with Windows Vista Home Premium x64 bit. I’ve heard there are some issues with Gateway allowing partitions on their machines – is this true? Would I be able to create a partition? I’ve been wanting Windows 7 for a while now, so any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
Where I click shrink volume, it gives me error like
“The attempted operation is invalid. Either the parameters specified are invalid or the operation can not be completed on the selected object..”
I tried to repartition on Vista. It won’t allow me to expand the D drive.
I have a 111 GB drive. C is 66.81, D is 200 MB. There are 44.78 unallocated. I want to put programs and data on D, and only the OS on C, which I want to shrink to 40 GB and put the rest on D.
The OS won’t let me shrink C anymore, and expand D. I only have the OS on the computer at this point.
Not sure why this doesn’t work logically.
Seems so easy. Looks so easy. Thanks for the tips, but, what do you do when you go to shrink the primary partition(boot partition) and it say there is “0” space available for the reduction and the “shrink” button simply isn’t activated due to this fact. Won’t let me shrink the drive to make the partition. Your observation and assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thank You.
I only have one partition for the entire hard drive. 232.8 GB total with 161GB currently available on the drive. Won’t let me reduce and says there is “0” space available for the reduction. PLease advise, thanks!