Other reasons may include creating a new hard drive separate from your C: drive that’s dedicated to only data. Or you might want to create an encrypted partition that no one can access without the correct security keys. Regardless of the reason, you shouldn’t just jump into the process immediately. There are a few things you should do to make sure you’ve sized the new partition correctly, and that you have a fall-back plan if things go bad.
Create a Windows 10 Backup
Create a Windows 10 Backup
If you’re about to create a partition with the same hard drive where your primary Windows 10 operating system is installed, you need to do it safely. Your first step should always be to take a backup image of your hard drive. Thankfully this is a very easy process to initiate, but it does take some time to complete. Set aside about an hour to finish this process.
Allocate Free Space To Create a Partition
Allocate Free Space To Create a Partition
To create a partition from your drive free space, you need to know how much free space you can spare. If you’re running Windows 10 on a single hard drive where only one main partition is allocated for the Windows 10 OS and all data files, you’ll need to make sure you still have plenty of space left over after you shrink that partition. To check this, open File Explorer, right-click the main system drive (in this example, that’s C:), and select Properties. Here, you’ll see both Used space and Free space. If you’re hoping to dual boot your PC with a new OS like Ubuntu Linux, make sure the free space can accommodate the minimum requirements of the new OS. For example, Ubuntu requires at least 25 GB. To leave room for data, you’ll want to allocate around 100 GB for a Ubuntu OS partition. Once you’ve calculated how much you want to shrink the main partition to make space for the new one, you’re ready to create your new partition.
Using Your Newly Allocated Partition
Using Your Newly Allocated Partition
You’ll handle this Unallocated space differently depending what you want to use it for. If you’re only interested in using it as new storage space for data, just right-click the partition and select New Simple Volume. You can make this an extended partition to store data. If you’re interested in using it to dual boot your windows 10 PC with a Linux OS like Ubuntu, you can walk through our guide on dual booting Windows 10 with Ubuntu. Or follow our guide to dual boot Windows 10 with Mint. You can also do both. If you create a dual boot system by installing Linux in a newly allocated partition, you could repeat the process above to create a third partition that can serve as shared data storage for both systems. How you decide to use your newly allocated partition is completely up to you.
