Friday, March 18, 2016
Create New Volumes without Partition !!
Disk Management is a nice tool to manage your hard disk drives. With this tool, you can easily format, shrink and extend your existing volems. You can do some other tasks too. But today Im gonna discuss about creating new volumes by splitting existing volumes.
Background Story
Two weeks ago, one of my acquaintances got a new laptop. It comes with Windows 8, Intel Core i5 processor and 1 TB Hard disk. Not very extraordinary nowadays. But I was really surprised when heard there is only 1 partition in his laptop!! Can you believe it? One partition for a 1 TB hard disk! My goodness - this is a thousand GB partition!
I know how to split a drive to create new partition. But didnt even try this earlier. After getting the case of 1000 GB partition, I tried to shrink a drive in my own PC. After successfully trying this on my PC, I advised him how to divide the one partition into several drives. By this time maybe he has fixed this. :)
Supported Versions:
Disk Management tool is same both in Windows 7 and 8. Windows XP may have the same advantage but Im not sure. If XP users has any problem, you can inform be through comments.
Create New Volumes Without Partition - No Restart! No Interruption!!
Make sure youre the Admin of your PC. And right now youre logged in as Administrator. Now start -
- Right click on My Computer icon from desktop. (How to show My Computer icon on desktop)
- Hit on the Manage option.
- Computer Management window will appear.
- Choose Disk Management under the Storage option from the left pane.
- Here you will get the list of your volumes with capacity and free spaces.
- Right click on the drive you wanna shrink.
- Select Shrink Volume and you will get the below window.
Here you will get the total size before shrink. Now enter the space to shrink. Simply count the 1000 MB for 1 GB. In the image Ive used 5000 MB for 5 GB. Then check how much you will have in the drive after shrink. Before proceed, make sure everything is okay.
Now Press Shrink > You will get the following image > Right click on the Free Space > New Simple Volume > Pres Next > Enter Simple Volume Simple > Next > Assign Drive Letter (Suppose L) > Format the volume (Choose format type, label) > Next > Finish.
Within few seconds, you will get a brand new drive!
How to Get it Back?
Suppose you made a mistake. Or you were just trying to do it. But dont want to divide the volume actually. How do you get the new volume back to your old volume? Very simple!
- Right click on the new volume.
- Choose Delete Volume.
- You will get the above image again.
- Now right click on your old volume and choose Extend volume.
- Press Next > Next > Finish.
This procedure doesnt require any restart. Even you dont need to close any program running on your PC. Its fast, simple and reliable.
Precautions:
While running this operation you should be very careful. Though this tool is safe to use, but you may lose your data for any wrong command. Suppose, you may delete a volume which contains your valuable files. Or you may format an existing partition which contains important data. So, before making a click, be sure youre really doing the right job.
If you have any query, dont forget to leave a comment . . .
Related Topics:
- How to Change the Drive Letters?
- Convert Drives to NTFS without Formatting!
- Hide your Hard Disk Drives from My Computer!!
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