Partitoning a 1tb hard drive

Hi,

Is any data on it ? Is windows installed on it already ?

If not you can go into windows disk management and do that their, if windows is on it you can download Easeus Partition Master Free and do it from their but there is a chance of fail and lose data and you might have to reinstall windows.

It's not clear whether you have seen Disk Management yet, so just in case, here's how to get there.
Click on Start at bottom left, then RIGHT-click on My Computer and click on Manage. In its left main menu, click on Disk Management. The right-hand side has TWO main panes. The upper one shows you all the drives your machine has and can use now. Concentrate on the LOWER RIGHT pane, which shows you all the drive hardware in the machine, even including things that Windows does not yet understand. (You may not have a mysterious units in your machine.)

For each storage unit in the Lower Right pane there is one horizontal block with label info at the left end: a header like "Disk 0", a type, a size in GB, and a Status. To the right of that are one or more sub-blocks, each representing a Partition on that unit. Each Partition is treated by Windows as one "drive". If there is any space not yet allocated to a Partition, it will be to the far right and called "Unallocated Space". Each Partition has its own label info: a disk name like "My C: Drive" that you gave it when it was first set up, a letter name like "D: ", a size in GB, a File System like "NTFS", a Status and a note about any special contents.

I expect that your 1TB unit shows only one Partition that takes up the whole space (no Unallocated Space), although there MIGHT be a second small Partition with no letter name and called a System Partition - this may have been created to hold a backup copy of the OS in case the installation on your SSD got corrupted.

NOTE: BEFORE going any further, the things you need to do MIGHT go wrong and cause you to lose all the stuff on this drive. Not likely, but still possible. So the prudent thing to do is BACK UP the entire 1TB unit (maybe make a clone copy) to another storage device, so that you can restore it if something does go wrong.

To get where you want to be, you will have two (maybe three) steps to do here. Fortunately, since your 1TB unit does NOT have Windows installed on it, you should be able to do this using Disk Management alone.

The first step is to Shrink the existing main Partition, called your D: drive, to create some Unallocated Space. To do this, RIGHT-Click on that Partition and choose to Shrink it. You will probably have to set a size you want it to become. The system may take a long time for this because it night have to move things around. Eventually when it finishes there should be a smaller D: Partition plus some Unallocated Space. At this point I suggest you back out of Disk Management and reboot so that Windows' Registry is fully updated to the new conditions.

Now go back into Disk Management and find that 1TB unit again. This time you RIGHT-Click on the new Unallocated Space and choose to Create a new Primary Partition from it. Make its size the entire space available if that's what you want. It does NOT have to be bootable - it's only for data storage. The Formatting details may be something you choose right now, OR might be something you have to do after the Partition has been Created - depends on whether your version combines both operations into one step in a helpful Wizard. For Formatting the new Partition, you have to choose a File System - make that NTFS. You can choose from Quick or Full Format. Quick will do the job relatively quickly. Full will take a long time because it tests EVERY sector in this Partition - not usually necessary for a new HDD but a precaution if you can afford the time. When all parameters are set, let it run until done. Back out of Disk Management and reboot, and your new "drive" with its own letter name will show up in My Computer.

In older versions of Disk Management, the Create Partition process did only that part. After it was done, you had to RIGHT-Click on that new Partition and Format it as a separate step. Options to choose the same as above.