The easy way to create partitions in Vista

My brand new Dell E520 desktop arrived, and I started playing with Vista. In a few minutes, I discovered something that XP doesn't have (unless I missed it). And this is one feature I've been wanting for ages. If you ever purchased a Dell or HP machine with a fat hard disk, and found that all they gave you was a single C:, you'll know what I mean. I'm the kind that likes to have multiple logical partitions to organize my files - say, a D: for my data, and a E: for my games etc.

Earlier, there were some options - you could format the drive, partition it and reinstall everything (read, pain in the a**); or you could use some utility like partition manager and be married to it until you decide to sell your PC.

That ends my inspiring talk, now let's get on to the procedure. Here is my setup - Vista home premium, a C: with 310 GB space, a 10 GB D: put in by Dell for their recovery files. I'll walk you through the procedure I followed to create a M: for storing media files, a G: for my games, a T: for my data files (D: is already taken!). Here are the steps:

1. Right click on My Computer (on Vista it shows up as Computer), click Manage.
2. When Computer Management screen opens, on the left pane, click Storage and choose Disk Management.
3. In the main panel, right click on C:. You should see a Shrink Volume option; click on it.
4. A dialog box will open, with the third line saying "Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB". It is convenient to see these things in GB, so divide this number by 1024 using calculator. Let us say that the value is 120 GB. This means that your C: can be "shrunk" to 190 GB (310 - 120) leaving you 120 GB to create your partitions. Note that, no file from your hard disk during this process.
   
5. Since I just needed 100 GB for my other partitions totally, I changed this value to 102400 (100 GB * 1024). Once you enter the value you want, press Shrink.
6. Now look at the bottom panel. You'll see that you have some "Unallocated" space, this being 100 GB in my case. Right click this space and choose "New Simple Volume" (or something similar, don't remember now).
   
7. The rest is easy. You can enter the amount of space you want, choose the file system type as NTFS and create the partition. You may want to check the "Quick formatting" check box to speed up things. In my case, I created a 40 GB partition and named it M: (for media). That left me with some more unallocated space (60 GB). I repeated this process and created two more partitions, a 30 GB G: for games and a 30 GB T: for my personal data. Note that, while creating the last partition, you can just leave it to the default value, since it takes the maximum available space (so the partition size would be a little more or less than what you expected, but it should be OK).
   

I write this from memory, so correct me if there is some minor mistake. Happy partitioning.