Creating A Primary Partition In Unallocated Space
In a previous section, Reassigning Drive Letters, I made some changes to the CD drive letters so they wouldn't interfere with drive letter assignment on future partitions. Those modifications are still in place. Now that the CD drive letters have been changed let's make some changes to Disk 0 that currently contains both the C: partition where XP is installed and another area with 23.63 GB of Unallocated space. By default, most applications like to install themselves in the C:\Program Files folder. Since I sized the C: partition to 5.00 GB and XP alone uses approximately half of that space the applications are going to have to find another home. It's time for another partition to hold applications.
The process of creating a new partition can be started in two ways, the first step being to click the Unallocated space in the graphical section of the display. Then either go to the menu and select Action > All Tasks > New Partition... or just right click the Unallocated space in the graphical display and select New Partition... to begin. In Fig. 01 I used the latter method.
The Welcome to the New Partition Wizard [Fig. 02] will open and provide some basic information about what can be accomplished with the Wizard.
The first item on the agenda is to select the type of partition to be created. Because I'm creating a partition in unallocated space there are only two options available; Primary and Extended partition. The Logical choice is grayed out because no Extended partition exists and logical drives can only be created in an Extended partition. I've included two screen captures [Figs. 03 and 04] of the same screen with different options selected so the text in the Description area is available that describes the difference between Primary and Extended partitions.
A question that's often asked is why one would choose to create an Extended partition rather than a Primary partition. Truthfully, I don't have a technical answer for that question, but that's not to say one doesn't exist. I'm sure I'll hear from many users with the technical answer, but for now if you know to fair degree of certainty that you won't want more than four volumes on the disk you can use Primary partitions. If you do want more than four volumes then the choice would be Extended partition as is indicated by the Description section of Fig. 04. Functionally, I've never found there to be any difference in how the two types operate, other than the fact you can start operating systems from Primary partitions where that isn't possible with an Extended partition. For this example I chose to create a Primary partition.
Once the partition type has been selected it's time to specify the partition size. The minimum and maximum size values are shown [Fig. 05] so it's only a matter of typing in the desired partition size. It's worth noting that the New Partition Wizard works in megabytes (MB) rather than gigabytes (GB) so adjust your thinking accordingly before entering a number or you're likely to end up with a partition that's sized much differently than what you intended. Entering a decimal point will return an error message.
Disk Management automatically offers to assign the next available drive letter to the new partition. Use the drop down selector to choose a different letter. If you're using the NTFS file system the Mount option will be available. Mounted drives are beyond the scope of this article, but the Help section of Microsoft Management Console provides information on their use. If you find the use of drive letters to be restrictive in the type of system you run it's well worth reading about mounted NTFS drives. The option is also available not to specify any drive letter or path.
The final step is to select the formatting options for the partition. It's not absolutely necessary to format the partition if you're just setting up a partition scheme that will be used later. If so, select the first option. If the partition is formatted at this time the drop down boxes are used to select the file system type and allocation unit size. Unless you have a specific reason reason to use FAT32 or change the allocation unit the defaults will work fine. Supply a label for the volume now (I used Programs) or just accept the default. If you want to save some time use the quick format option.
Review the selected settings [Fig. 08] and click the [Finish] button. The process will begin immediately with no further user intervention.
As Fig. 09 illustrates, the partition Programs has been created and added to Disk Management, assigned drive letter D and is formatted with the NTFS file system. The Unallocated space has been reduced to 13.87 GB as a result of adding the new partition.
Fig. 09
meka karala balapan.
