This post shows students and new users steps to setup a new hard drive and partition it when using Windows 11. Windows allows users to create partitions on hard disk drive to better manage data and improve performance in some cases.
A new computer may come with a single hard drive and one or partitions. If you attach a new hard drive to your computer, it will typically attach with a single partition as well. You can create as many partitions as the system or drive allows. But you won’t want to do that in a normal situation.
In most cases, one or two partitions on a hard drive is reasonable when you want to create separate partitions so that special data is on its one partition and not sharing the same partition with the operating system.
In Windows, the partition you create is referred to as drives and generally have a letter associated with it. You can create, shrink, resize partitions, and more.
To get started creating and managing partitions in Windows 11, follow the steps below.
How to create a partition in Windows 11
As mentioned above, one can create partitions from the system hard drive. A hard drive in Windows will have a single partition. That single partition can be shrunk, resized to create additions partitions on the hard drive.
The steps below show you how to do that in Windows 11.
First, click on the Start menu and type Create and format hard disk partitions, under Best match, select the highlighted to open control panel app.
The Windows Disk Management tool should look similar to the image below. Any disks not yet set up are shown as Not Initialized and Unallocated.
Windows will prompt you to initialize a new hard disk that has not be initialized. Click the OK button when prompted as show above.
Once the hard drive is initialized, you can begin creating partitions. Windows 11 supports GPT, so you can choose that option. By default, MBR is selected, and if you’re not sure if the drive you install supports GPT, then MBR should be be sufficient.
If you’re setting up a drive or partition larger than 2 TB or want to use the latest partitioning style, select GPT.
How to create a new simple partition in Windows 11
On an Initialized drive with Unallocated partition, right-click and Select New Partition or New Simple Volume from the option shown.
A New Simple Volume Wizard opens. Click Next to begin setting up a new partition.
Specify the size of the partition you want to create, and click then Next. Partition or Volume Size is the size is the maximum capacity in MB of the drive. By default it will create a partition to use up the entire space on the drive.
If you want to create multiple partitions on the drive, you’ll have to specify an amount that doesn’t use up the entire space on the hard drive.
Select a drive letter for your new partition, and click the Next button.
Ensure the drive format is NTFS, change the volume’s name (optional), and click the Next button.
Click the Finish button to complete the wizard.
Once complete, the new partition should appear in Disk Management.
That should do it!
Conclusion:
This post showed you how to create a partition on Windows 11. If you find any error above or have something to add, please use the comment form below.
