At the heart of every PC is a storage drive, which stores the Microsoft Windows operating system and also contains space for your personal data, documents, photos, and applications. Regardless of ...

Partitioning your hard drive sounds like a technically involved task that most people don’t need to bother with—but it’s actually relatively simple to do, doesn’t have to cost you any money, and can ...

Editor’s note (1/12/10): For more-current advice, see “How (and Why) to Partition Your Hard Drive.” No matter the capacity of your PC’s hard drive, chances are that it’s set up to function as one ...

Partitioning a hard drive is like turning one hard drive into two. By creating a partition, you'll have two drive letters (such as "C" and "D" drives), and formatting one partition does not affect the ...

A partition separates a section of a physical disk into another virtual drive. When you split a hard drive into two partitions, you're creating a separate disk that your operating system (like Windows ...

Partitioning means writing the hard drive sectors that will make up the partition table. It contains information on the partition, including sector size, position with respect to the primary partition ...

Reader Kevin Riley has a splitting dilemma. He writes: I have a 1TB FireWire hard drive that is about a quarter full. I’d like to partition the drive but don’t want to have to back up all my data to ...

If you just installed a new hard drive in your computer and you are running the Ubuntu operating system, you must partition and format the new drive before you can use it. To use the drive with Ubuntu ...

Unlike internal hard drives, most external hard drives come already partitioned and formatted. However, if you need multiple partitions for your business data, you may need to remove or shrink the ...

Sometimes installing OS X may result in odd behavior if the partition scheme on the drive is not set up properly. If you are experiencing problems, a simple repartition during setup may be an easy fix ...

Most PCs come from the factory with a single partition on their hard drive, meaning that it shows up as one drive in the Computer window (as C:, typically). But keeping your data, applications, and ...