How to partition a hard disk which has windows

My laptop has 320 GB hard disk but it has not been partitioned. It has Windows Vista pre installed. Is there any way to make partitions from the C drive? C drive is my entire hard disk right now.

 

Sure, go Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Disk Management and right click on the drive then choose shrink. After the shrink you will then have to assign a drive letter and format the new partition. There's a command that you can run to go directly there but I don't recall it ATM. Someone else here knows for sure.

 

Click START, then RUN, the type in:
diskmgmt.msc [press enter]

Or, you could use the command line method?

diskpart

 

I went through the process but disk management shows only 90 GB as size of available shrink space. What about the other 250 GB or so? Or does that mean that c drive can be shrunk to 90 GB?

 

OK, you have unmovable files that are hindering the shrink. You can disable 'Hibernate' and 'System Restore' and that should give you more space than 90GB to free up. There are probably other files too so run a defrag program first like Defraggler. I can't think of anything else ATM, my brain works slowly.

 

With hibernation, system restore and page file off i got the shrink volume size to 105 GB. Will try defragmenting it and then check again.

 

Vista's disk management never shrinks the system partition satisfactorily because, as has been said, there are fixed files which limit what you can do. But in any case I would never advocate resizing a system partition without first getting the means to recover should it go wrong, preferably Acronis. There are now free backup and partitioning tools available, such as Easeus or Macrium Reflect, though I can't vouch for them myself.

 

The toshiba laptop had a program to create recovery disks. I created the disks. Is that good enough for back up before I try shrinking?

 

Hey, not bad at all but don't go too far either depending on if you will be installing games or other apps that can't be installed on other drives than C. A bare minimum of 50 GB's IMO.

 

Possibly, but most recovery disks will only put you back to factory gate state. Some, like Acers, allow the creation of subsequent backup images too, but they are only as good as how up-to-date they are. You really need an imaging program that can image and restore what you have right now

 

Regarding size it depends on how you are going to use it. Before I discovered the joys of VirtualBox 50GB was just about enough, now I need 100GB.

 

Any suggestions for programs to create backup image of the system?

 

As I said, Easeus Todo is a free backup tool which should do the job. I just haven't used it myself.

 

Managed to extract 190 GB after turning off system restore, hibernation, pagefile and then defragmenting and consolidating free space using PerfectDisk 10 Professional trial version.

 

That's a good result, and hopefully sufficient for your needs. Don't just forget about imaging though though just because it has worked without problems this time. Exactly what would you have done if your system had failed to boot afterwards?

 

:confused I forgot about it and just clicked on shrink