GParted is a great open source partitioning utility. It is fast and easy to use. I always recommend to my students that they partition their hard drives. This separates your operating system from your important files. The operating system is always at risk from viruses, worms, fragmentation, corruption, and just normal Windows problems. If Windows stops working it can be challenging to recover your important files. However, with a second partition you could easily reboot to a second operating system and recover all your important files. In order to do this you need a second operating system outside the one you normally use. Purchasing a second hard drive (either internal or external drive) would help. Partition the second drive and install Windows on the first primary partition. Viruses and worms only attack and infect running operating systems so this could be your backup plan if your primary operating system goes down. I usually have at least 3 partitions on my drives. I run DOS on the first partition, Windows XP on the second, and files/backups on the third or fourth. I like using Ghost for backups or imaging and I run it from DOS. I love DOS, it is a great maintenance operating system that always works and works fast. It is hard to perform Windows imaging or re-imaging when Windows wo'nt work. The following steps will take you through partitioning a fresh hard drive:

1. Download Insert Live, which has GParted (live CDs will run independent of your operating system) from the following link: http://sourceforge.net/projects/insert/

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2. You can burn the ISO file onto a CD and then reboot your computer to the CD. WARNING!!! Backup all important files first. Partitioning a hard drive will destroy all your data. I am going to run GParted as a demo from a virtual machine that I have running in Virtual PC. I suggest you do this a few times to get familiar with GParted before partitioning your real hard drive.

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3. Start Virtual PC and start a new virtual machine. Put the Insert disk that you burned from the ISO in the CDROM or you can just point to the ISO file that you downloaded and Virtual PC can run the ISO. Important Tip: Running ISO files like CDs can save on CDs when you are developing new lives disks, because you can test the ISO first to see if everything is working right before burning the CD.

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4. At the top menu in Virtual PC machine select CD>Capture ISO Image... If it doesn’t start, at the top menu select Action>Ctrl-Atl-Del or Reset to restart the virtual machine. This is a Linux based operating system so it boots a little differently. After it finishes booting you should see the Insert Welcome Screen.

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5.  Right click on the blue desktop background and select Applications>Recovery/Backup> gparted to start GParted.

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6.  You will see the opening GParted screen which has identified the unallocated fresh drive.  Right click and select new.

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7.  This screen allows you to create a primary partition (default) and select a file system.  As you can see there is a large selection, NTFS or FAT32 will work with Windows.  NTFS is always the perferred because it is faster, handles files greater than 4GB, and has some recovery features that FAT32 is lacking.  Select NTFS file system.

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8. Now set the size of this first partition. I am going to set it at 30GB which leaves, in this example, about 35GB for the other partitions. Click add to add the partition.

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9. Set the next 2 partitions to divide the remaining space. Make sure to set the files type again to NTFS. The partition type if running DOS needs to be set to extended since DOS can only handle one primary partition per drive.

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10.  Make sure you have at least 3 partitions with the correct size and file type.  You can always go back and make needed changes.

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11. The select the green check mark and apply and save the changes.  Now your ready to begin installing your operating system.

More Hubs you might find helpful.

FDISK DOS Partition Utility Tutorial Fdisk is a MS (Microsoft) DOS utility for partitioning hard drives. You really need have a partition for important data and operating system backup images. Backup images will allow you to easily and quickly restore your system if needed.