Windows 7: Partitioning my hard disk

Hi Guys,

My laptop comes with 1 partition called (c: ) which consists of the windows 7 home premium OS. I would like to partition it so that I can separate my OS and Data.

I understand that there are a few tools available such as acronis and partition magic (not sure if there's other). Can I use it on my windows 7? And if yes, any idea how much harddisk space should be allocated for the OS portion?

Thanks.

Take a look at this tutorial:
Partition or Volume - Shrink

Here you have all the instructions you need: Data Partition For the C partition, 60GBs is usually enough - unless you have games that take a lot of space. My Windows 7 never exceeded 18GBs (32bit) and 21GB (64bit).

Use Disk Mgmt as theog suggests then follow whs's excellent video showing how to set up a separate data partition.

Do not use Partition Magic.

For any partitioning needs which cannot be accomplished by Disk Mgmt use free Partition Wizard bootable CD which works flawlessly with Windows 7.

Hello kelvinwgr.





Don't go much less than 60GB as WHS has suggested so Windows will have enough room to expand as needed.

Hi Guys, okay thanks for all the advice. Let me take some time to go through the tutorial and I will try it out.

Hi Greg, any reasons not to use partition magic? Does it screw up the OS or hdd?

Partition Magic has not been updated in several years. But you can try it just to see what it does to your system. It's a free world - LOL.

Don't just hack away with a partitioning tool and HOPE that will work; instead, use the Windows 7 Disk Management utility to shrink the "C" partition first. Then, reboot into Windows 7 a couple of times for it to make the necessary adjustments.

Then ... you can use your partitioning tool to create another partition.

Or, since you're already inside Windows 7, you can just use the same Windows 7 Disk Management utility to create and format a data partition.

And, yes, you CAN shrink the Windows 7 OS partition while inside Windows 7. You don't have to resort to third-party partitioning tools to do this.

If you DO want to use third-party tools, another one to consider is EASEUS Partition Master. They just updated it again to version 6.x, and a Home version is available from the website as a free download.

We see one OS screwed up per month on average by Partition Magic.

Any other 3rd party partition manager can fail during Resizing. Only PW has built-in Data Protection mode which will restart and attempt to Resize again if it fails, allowing you to interrupt it during startup countdown to start Windows 7 normally.

In your case, you can achieve what you want using Disk Management. If you need any more, just ask back for exact steps using PW CD.

Partition or Volume - Shrink
Partition or Volume - Create New

Hi Guys. Thanks for the advice and I have decided not to use partition magic to partition my disk. I have read through the tutorial, however, I still have some questions and seek your professional advice.

I believe the shrink feature is only available in windows 7 os? I don't see it in windows xp. When I try to shrink my c drive, the value in "size of available shrink space in MB" is automatically generated (Please refer to screenshots). The value is less than half of my total harddisk size. Any idea how does this value come about? Basically, my concern here is that I wish to set a suitable disk size for OS as C drive and the rest to be used for data as D drive. (No gaming is involved)

The value "132741 MB", if I want to convert the value to GB, is the following way the correct to calculate:

132741 divided by 1024 = 129 GB (approximate)