The Windows Disk Management utility (available in Computer Management) is a very easy to use tool for basic partition creation and deletion on secondary drives. However, it struggles whenever there is a partition with an ‘unknown’ or ‘foreign’ format, such as on OEM utility partitions. Using Disk Management, you can delete/format all...
If you have a hard drive with some unallocated space on the end of (i.e. not currently assigned to a partition) and want to use that space to add to an existing partition, a simple and effective tool you can use is Diskpart. This tool is included with Windows XP and later. The documentation is pretty easy to follow, but for example suppose you want to extend the...
If you ever have the need to make changes to your hard drive partitions, rather than immediately going to the commercial options, check out the open source GParted. GParted fully supports NTFS and FAT as well as the two major Linux file systems (ext2/ext3) along with lots of other files systems. You can shrink, grow, copy, move (and more) partitions which should...
Subscribe to PCMech
Get the best of PCMech delivered straight to your inbox, just like the 28,943 other awesome people who already have.
