How To Make Partitions In Windows 10

Status
Not open for further replies.

BenJaD

Reputable
Oct 7, 2014
68
0
4,660
If you use the Disk Management approach - be aware that you are only allowed to place 3 logical drives on one physical drive. I partitioned an 8 terabyte HDD to have 4 roughly equivalent logical drives. I used three of the four, keeping the 4th in reserve (I thought). When I returned to the drive in Management - I could not create a logical drive. More frustrating after that realization - I could not even resize the drives I had previously created; nor could I add size to the existing drives from the unused space.
Unhappily it took me a bit of digging to find that no more than three - and when you are done you cannot resize.
On the other hand Ubuntu live disk boot will allow you to partition as you wish ---
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
logical drives are just partitions right? The number of partitions on a drive is restricted by its format, not windows. If you are using MBR then you are restricted to 4, but if drive is GPT you can have up to 128 partitions. I saw a drive with 15 partitions yesterday, I know it can be done.

MBR not really suited to an 8tb drive as it can only access 2tb at a time.

 

chikatana

Distinguished
Dec 4, 2005
9
0
18,510
What's the point writing an article that everybody knows. Are you going to start a series teaching people how to power on a computer, how to save files and so on?
 

tamalero

Distinguished
Oct 25, 2006
1,128
135
19,470


You should be able to "extend" the last partition to add the additional free space that is unmarked.

Just click the last partition, select EXTEND, and then select the remaining space.


There are also tools that lets you do this, like partition magic or hard disk manager.


 

In the old days we learned that the outer edge of hard drives moves more data under the head. Knowing that you didn't want data you was just storing to use up the fastest parts of the drive. Thus a partition could be used then to store data on the inner part of the disk while the outer part was saved for your OS and programs. Also this saved disk space as the size of the drives partition determined the size in KB of space that a file would take. See the drive had all these small units I think thats what it was called. Thus a file only 1kb would eat up an 8kb unit due to the limited number per partition. Create a second partition on the drive and the file is only waste 3kb's instead of 7kb.

Now the saving of space is probably less of an issue today as most storage is movies, music, PDF's, and other large files. The faster parts of the drive tho are still as important today. Other things you can do with partition like have a dual boot second OS also plays a factor.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


If your OS and applcations are on the outer, faster portion of the drive, and the data is on the slower inner tracks, you still have the same 'problem'. No one uses applications in isolation. An application will use the 'data'.
If that is in a different partition on the slower part of the drive...you experience the same slower performance.

And in the land of SSD's, totally irrelevant.
 

BenJaD

Reputable
Oct 7, 2014
68
0
4,660


Great information - I had never considered the storage consideration of GPT versus MBR. At least this one little bit I have learned today! Thank ypu!
 

BenJaD

Reputable
Oct 7, 2014
68
0
4,660


I am running this on a W7Pro OS - I was unable to do any change to the existing format and partitions on the drive. Generally, I have machines running W10 on GPT HDD or SDD. As I said early on - I rely on Ubuntu live disk to partition drives that are problematic. Other than a long tedious download and then a burn the price is right.
 

BenJaD

Reputable
Oct 7, 2014
68
0
4,660


Hear that! I have already upsized OS SSD on two machines from 250 to 500 GB. Have not figured out a reasonable use for the replaced drives - My current lust is a 1Tb SSD to load games to. Once upon a day the current WD Black was really the deal - now not so much.
Wonder what that will be by the time my grandchildren are building machines at home?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


My 3 main systems in the house are SSD only. 8 drives among the 3 systems.
The only spinning drives live in or USB attached to the Qnap NAS box. 4 x 4TB RAID 5, and a couple others.
 

BenJaD

Reputable
Oct 7, 2014
68
0
4,660
Considering the multiple terabytes on HDD I have - my retired income makes that beyond my $$ reach. Remembering the first HDD I purchased here was in the range of $600 for which I took home a 300 Mb drive - and thought I had all I would ever need. Oh yeah!
 

Na user created data was small by comparision. The OS and programs were large so they took very long to start.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator


is win 7 pro 32bit or 64 bit? If 64 bit, it supports GPT drives (provided motherboard supports UEFI) so you should be able to get access to more than 4 partitions on that drive.

Win 7 32bit doesn't support GPT though. Its mainly used by win 8 and 10.
MBR drive max drive size is 2tb, GPT max drive size is 18.8 million tb... guess why its used now over MBR?
 

Zaporro

Honorable
Jan 23, 2014
249
0
10,710
LMAO, is this some kind of joke?

"Tom's Hardware For Hardcore PC Enthusiast"

Front page article -> How to make partitions

.......
 

Math Geek

Titan
Ambassador
do a quick search of this forum for "help i got a virus and all my data is gone" and see how many results you get. likely 100 a day or more of those show up here!!

this is why you would want a partition. i ALWAYS keep data separate from my OS/programs. if anything happens to my OS then it is easy to reinstall windows and move on. but trying to save/recover possibly TB's of data at the same time is almost impossible for the average user. but make one simple partition and keep the data on the second one and no worries. unless the drive itself fails, you're good to go. i prefer 2 physical drives to separate data but a simple partition is a great safe-guard if that's not possible.

and assuming that everyone here is all ssd and can't even recall what a hdd looks like is silly. again answer question all day for a few days and see just how many folks are running older hardware and are just happy to have a 1 tb hdd. working with 4-5 yr old gpu's on 8 yr old cpu's.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
If all you have is a single drive, then yes. You need to partition off the OS and applications from your data.
Of course, that does nothing for any ransomware or physical drive fail.

And of course, you've not been doing any backups.

Partitioning for data protection was not mentioned in the article, though.
It was just "how", not "why".
 

Math Geek

Titan
Ambassador
just threw that in for the sake of the few who asked why you'd want to do it. like in the very first comment.

so figured i'd shed some light on why you'd want to, now that tom's has shown how to do it :D
 

randomizer

Champion
Moderator


You are restricted to 4 primary partitions, but one (and only one) of those partitions can be an extended partition that contains extended boot records for any number of logical partitions. In practice the number is limited (in Windows) by the number of available drive letters. Windows GUI tools will create an extended partition by default if you only have room for one more primary partition.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator
this seems to say the limit of 4 only applies to mbr

This is not a Linux restriction, it's a restriction of the MBR partition layout. The original MBR spec fit the partition layout into a single 512 byte sector, and there was only room to define four "primary" partitions there. Various nonstandard extensions exist allowing more than four partitions in MBR, but the classical spec only allotted for four.

"Extended boot records" are a fairly common way of extending MBR past its first four primary partitions. One partition entry in the MBR partition table is actually a pointer to another partition table. This second partition table can have a pointer into a third, etc etc, giving, in principle, an unlimited number of extended partitions. However, since these extended partitions are not defined inside the main MBR, they are not primary partitions, and you typically cannot boot from them.

Switching to a more modern standard, such as GPT, removes this restriction -- but may not be compatible with some motherboards and operating systems. For example, Windows does not support EFI, the modern spec underlying GPT, unless you are running a 64-bit operating system.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22367457/maximum-number-of-primary-partitions
 
Status
Not open for further replies.