Hi, Justin.
No need to buy anything but Vista itself. Every version of Windows starting
with Windows 2000 has included Disk Management. This replaced the old
MS-DOS programs FDISK and Format - and several other older tools. As the
name says, it manages all your hard disks - and other devices (such as
optical drives, USB flash drives, network drives, and even digital cameras
and card readers - anything that can be assigned a "drive" letter).
There are several ways to start Disk Management. The simplest in Vista is
just to press Start, then type "diskmgmt.msc" and press <Enter>. You'll
need to furnish Administrator credentials because you will be working at a
depth that can damage your computer if you are careless with it. Maximize
the screen so that you are not working through a keyhole. (You'll have to
do this each time you run Disk Management; I don't understand why MS hasn't
fixed this through several versions of DM.)
Invest some time in studying this screen and the Help file. Although the
Help file is arranged as a reference, not as a tutorial (and covers the full
Microsoft Management Console, not just the Disk Management snap-in), there
is a ton of useful information about hard drives that you can use, not just
for this project but for as long as you keep using computers - which may be
the rest of your life. You can change the View, but by default, the top of
the screen shows the Volume List and the bottom is a Graphical View of your
disks and the partitions on each one.
With this tool, you can create partitions, format them, delete them, shrink
and expand them, assign drive letters, and other tasks.
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
Windows Live Mail 2009 (14.0.8064.0206) in Win7 Ultimate x64 7000
