Partition in Windows 7 Home Premium without formatting

BareFoot,
He has an additional desire. See following:

Yes, I just wanted to separate the OS and the data, in case I need to reinstall my Windows. And yes, I’m using Disk Management to do the partition. However, I encountered a problem in shrinking part (creating an unallocated space). When I tried to shrink my C drive, it appears that I can only shrink it half, approximately 300 GB (snip attached). What I need is, to leave around 100 GB for C drive (OS) and have the rest for my Data

Hello. Have a look through Method One of this tutorial linked below for some ideas.

Partition / Extended : Logical Drives

Well done, kulerdenyu ! It looks great .

To discuss the difference between primary and logical volumes, this place is short enough. You may have a nice basic reading : Disk partitioning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

That green box around data partition means it is an extended volume. Yes , it is not noly normal, but also natural for such partitions.

You can do this partitioning more than once, if you do the partitioning within that green box, and format it as logical .

We use basic disks in PCs. A basic disk is allowed to have four primary partitions at a maximum. An extended volume is alos treated as a primary partition. So , three primary and one extended (within which how many logicals you may create) is the same thing as four primaries.

If, by any chance the disk is partitioned as more than four primaries, it goes dynamic, and fails to get booted. It is too difficult to bring a dynamic disk back to basic, and in most of the cases all the data of the disk is to be sacrificed to do the conversion back .

So we suggest to make partitions logical, when there are already three primary partitions in a disk .