Whats it mean when you partition your hard drive and how do you do it?

Question

Also, If you create a partition can you get rid of it? Why would someone want to partition? If your hard drive is 100% and your partition 50% of it that now becomes a different drive? Explain about partitions, thanks

Answer 1

software like partation magic can do anything you need.

Creating partitions on you hard drive will split it into different sections. So instead of just a C drive, you might have a C and a D drive, or more. It takes one physical drive and digitally turns it into multiple drives.

Answer 2

It just make a single hard drive into different portion.  For example, if you buy a hard drive with a capacity of 500gb, but you do not want to have 500gb into a single hard drive.  Then you might consider to split into few parts, which you can partition it.  

Answer 3

partitioning: Free space on a hard disk must be partitioned before it can be used by an operating system. Creating a partition reserves a physical portion of the hard drive space for use as a logical drive, or volume, that the operating system can address.

Here is a web site for beginners. Very informative. Check it out.

Answer 4

Partitioning the hard drive is taking 1 physical hard drive and splitting it up into sections.

Originally people would partition hard drives so that the operating system could use the drive.  Example:  You just got the "newest" hard drive and it was 500 GB, but your Operating System only can "see or use" a 250 GB Hard Drive.  So you would partition the hard drive into two partions, each 250 GB.  Partition 1 would be Drive C.  And partition 2 would be Drive D. (They would not be A or B because those were assigned to the floppy drive).

Another option would be taking the same 500 GB hard drive and breaking it up into 3 drives.  For example.  Say you wanted to have a drive that contained all your music and one that had all your documents, seperate from your Operating system, just in case you had to format the hard drive and to re-install your Operating system.  So you had 1 (250 GB) drive and 2 (125 GB) partions.  

Now, most computers come with 2 partitions.  1 (the C drive) contains your operating system, drivers, and software.  Plus any documents you create.  And 2 (the D drive) that contains a backup of the Operating System, drivers and software that came with the computer.

This way, the manufacturer of the computer does not have to send all the "software", drivers and Operating System out on seperate disks to restore the computer if you ever have to format.-- This can be a blessing (less chance of loosing anything) and a curse (No OS disk if you just need to re-install the OS).

If you create a partition you can remove it.  If the partition was created with fdisk you have to remove all partitions and reformat the hard drive.  If the partition was created using software (partition magic for example) the program will allow to resize and I believe also remove partitions if you just want to use the whole drive (example all 500 GB) as one drive.

Answer 5

partitioning your HDD turns one physical HDD into 2 or 3 virtual HDDs. most common uses are to dual or tri boot OSs or to back up important files so if you need to reformat you can just delete the infected partition and recreate it. You create partitions when you first format your HDD when installing your OS but there are partition management softwares out that will allow you to add, remove, or edit them later