It use to be if you had a formatted hard drive with existing partitions, and you wanted to add or shrink one of them you needed a special utility called a disk partitioning tools such as Partition Magic. The Windows 7 Disk Management console has disk partitioning functionality built into it.
Warning: Make a good backup of your drive before proceeding with the instructions below.
- To open the Disk Management console from the Start menu, in the Search field type DISKMGMT.MSC, and press Enter. Press the YES button if prompted by the UAC (User Account Control).
- Right-click a drive that you want to shrink and choose Shrink Volume... from the menu.
- A dialog will display showing you how much space is available you can shrink the drive by. Specify an amount, then press the Shrink button.
- Right-click the newly available partition and choose New Simple Volume. Follow the steps in the wizard to specify the size and assign a letter to the new drive, and format the new drive.
