How to Easily Create a Partition on Your Hard Disk with XP

If you’ve moved up from Windows 95 or 98 to Windows XP, one big thing you’ll notice is that creating new partitions doesn’t have to be done from the command line any more. Windows XP makes it easy to create a new partition using the graphical disk management tool. Here’s how:

1. Turn off your computer and install your new hard disk. It’s unlikely that you have any unpartitioned space on which to create a new partition on the drive already in the machine, so you’ll need to add a new drive. New drives typically don’t come preformatted, so you’ll need to create your own partitions and format them.

2. Start your computer and logon as an administrator. Click Start and then click the Run command. In the Open text box type: diskmgmt.msc and click OK.

3. A Wizard will appear when the Disk Management console opens. Go through the Wizard’s steps and allow it to initialize the new disk, but do not allow the Wizard to convert the disk from basic to dynamic.

4. You will see, on the left side of the console, disk icons that represent “Disk 0″, “Disk 1,” etc. Your new disk should be the one with the highest number. The size of the disk should be listed, and the word “Unallocated” should be just under the size. Right click where it shows the size of the disk and click the New Partition command.

5. Click Next on the New Partition Wizard Welcome page.

6. On the Select Partition Type page, click on both of the options and read the Descriptions. We’ll assume here you’re creating a primary partition. Select Primary partition and click Next.

7. On the Specify Partition Size page, type in the size of the partition. Depending on what you want to use the disk for, you might want to create more than one partition. Type in the size of the new partition in the Partition size in MB text box and click Next.

8. On the Assign Drive Letter or Path page, you can bind the partition to a drive letter or mount it in an empty NTFS folder. In this example, you’ll do it the old fashioned way and assign the partition a new drive letter. Select the drive letter and click Next.

9. You need to format the partition to use it. Always use NTFS unless you need to allow other operating systems on the same machine to access the drive. You can use the defaults, or customize the Allocation unit size based on the types of applications you want to run on the disk. Click Next.

10. Click Finish.