Well my emachine:C(or c drive) has 280gb, is there anyway to split this into 2 parts with 140gb on each?
I'd suggest you download and install
Paritition Wizard (free) Home Edition v5.2 along with its standalone boot CD which you can burn by
downloading this ISO file. The program itself runs under Win7, so you can see drive letters.
The standalone boot CD is for emergencies, disaster/recovery, and for partition-related operations that cannot be performed while the Win7 operating system is active but must be run while standalone booted.
In the case of wanting to subdivide your one-and-only hard drive which today contains a one-and-only C-drive into more than one partition, you first have to shrink C. This frees up space at the high-end of the drive. C is what's referred to as "primary" partition type, but that's just a technical description for HOW it is allocated.
A standard hard drive can support up to four PRIMARY partitions. In a one-OS environment, one of those four allowed primary partitions is the 100MB "system reserved" partition which contains the Win7 boot manager files. Then the second primary partition (which in your case takes the entire rest of the drive) is typically C, and C only.
So by freeing up free space from a shrunken C, we now have the option of allocating additional primary partition(s) in the newly available free space, but if you choose "primary" partition type there is that maximum limit of FOUR total primary partitions on the drive to contend with.
More recommended, for its flexibility and lack of limitation, is to use that newly available free space to create one or more "logical" partitions (as opposed to "primary" partitions). You can have any number of "logical" partitions in that free space... you're not limited to a total of four on the drive, as would be the case if these new parititions were of the "primary" type.
Anyway, when you install Partition Wizard and run it under Win7 you specify an operation for it to perform which is to "resize" the C partition. This cannot be done while Win7 is actually booted, so it will tell you that you need to close the program and restart... and then Partition Wizard will kick in at boot time (before Win7 gets booted) when the shrinking of C will now occur. Alternatively, you can boot to the standalone PW CD and do the operation right then and there... since you're not running under Win7.
Anyway, once C is resized via either of the two above methods, Win7 is then booted... and you now have this freespace at the high end of the drive. You can then use Partition Wizard running under Win7, to allocate one or more partitions from within this free space. Again my recommendation is to define it/them as "logical" partition types, not "primary".
Partition Wizard can also assign Windows drive letters to these new partition(s), and you may need to re-boot to complete the process.
Very easy... but the first step is to shrink C, which does require either a re-boot (to finish the 2nd-half of what Partition Wizard needs to do) or just boot to the PW standalone CD and do the function directly from its standalone GUI interface.
Questions?
(good idea is to back up your data before doing this kind of thing)
