Sometimes you need to be able to partition a drive in windows, lets say you bought a new laptop and it comes with one 500GB hadd. If you want to partition this hard drive, create a second disk, you can use the built in “shrink” function from windows.

Step 1: Type Computer Management in the search field in the Start Menu, and click in first available option.

Step 2 – When Computer management comes up, go down to Storage > Disk Management

Step 3 – When the Disk Management menu comes up, select the drive you wish to “shrink”

Step 4 – Right-click on drive and choose Shrink Volume to start partitioning process.

Step 5 – Computer will scan for available Shrink Space

Step 6 – Computer will show you maximum available space to be able to shrink hard drive by, example, if 500 GB are shrunk by 200GB, you will end up with a 300 GB C: disk and a 200 GB D: disk.

Step 7 – When you have the correct sizes you want to establish, click Shrink for windows to start the repartitioning process, windows will first shrink the C: drive (current drive on your system), and will create a second drive (empty volume/unallocated). Step 8 – Right-click on new drive, choose format to choose to format to a file system used by windows, and assign a letter to the new drive, usually D: if not in use Note: usually its good practice to defragment drive (C:) before partitioning, in case partitioning a volume (drive) that is not in use, defragmenting is not needed.