Partitioning a hard drive

[ADAMjs]

Hi,

I have been running my laptop for years and suffered a huge hard drive error a year ago. Luckily, with a bit of research and use of linux to recover my data, I managed to replace the hard drive and it's been working fine ever since.

The only issue is, I never partitioned the new drive when I installed it, and I've been having nightmares that something might go wrong again recently so I want to back up all my data and do a fresh partition.

My question is, I have no experience doing this - is it possible to create a drive partition with all my data still on the drive and then shift data between the new partitioned drives? Or do I have to back up ALL my data, programs etc, and then wipe the drive and create the partition and then load all my data and programs back on after?

Could someone point me in the direction of a good step by step for someone in my position with a lot of data sitting on my hard drive?

[TigerManGaming]

Partitoning a hard drive usually isn't too difficult, and doesn't require your drive to be wiped, but if your entire drive fails, all of the partitions will be unreadable. If you need to partition, on windows 10:

- Go to the start menu

- Search 'partition', And select 'Create and format hard disk partitions'.

- Assuming your drive is new, and hasn't been partitioned before,you should have 1-3 partitions already made. (With my HP laptop i had 2)

- Shrink the biggest partiton by the ammount you want by right clicking the biggest partition and selecting 'Shrink Volume'.

- Choose an appropriate ammount to shrink by (1024 MB is 1GB)

- Once you have shrunk your main partition, There should be a new black area called 'Unallocated'.

- Right click it, And select 'New Simple Volume'.

- Run through the setup with the following settings (4th page of wizard):

file system: NTFS

Allocation unit size: Defualt

Volume label: (Whatever name you want)

- Your done. If you open File Explorer, You should see your new partition, and you are able to put files onto it.

[ADAMjs]

Ok, thanks - so essentially, by creating a new partition, I'm creating an empty drive, so as long as I have a reasonable amount of space, then that will be created and I can just start transferring over my data so that I can keep my programs on the original?

Can you recommend a good hard drive partition split between data and programs?

I have a 1TB hard drive, which 600GB used, 300GB unused - would you recommend cleaning up my hard drive first so I can make a split that will be adequate for the data I need to store.

I'm not sure what the likely split is between programs and data

[TigerManGaming · Accepted solution]

I would advise removing a few files that you don't need, or apps you don't use, But apart from that i would just go for an ammount of space you deem necessary. Assuming you can loose 30GB or more, make a partition of about 400GB, and put the most important files onto the partition. That way, if your OS is corrupted, your files have twice the chance to be recovered, but if you get a virus that encrypts files on all drives/partitions, or your drive dies, ALL of the partitions will go with it. If your data is Really important, An external Hard Drive or cloud storage are much safer options.