Hi, Geddy.
Disk Management was created just for these purposes. You don't need any
third-party program for this job.
The Help file in Disk Management explains a lot of things that many
long-time PC users have long wondered about but never taken the time to
learn - including what I'm about to tell you.
How can I partition my D: Drive one more time so that I have
a partition within a partition? Better said, I want a D: and E: as well.
Each physical drive can hold up to 4 partitions, of which ONE may be an
"extended partition"; the others are "primary partitions". Only a primary
partition can be made Active (bootable). Each primary partition can be
assigned a "drive" letter and formatted.
The extended partition does not get a drive letter and cannot be formatted.
However, any number of "logical drives" can be created within the extended
partition. Each logical drive gets its own letter and can be separately
formatted. The term "drive" is often used indiscriminately to mean a
physical drive, a primary partition or a logical drive - or maybe something
else. :>( "Partition" also is often used to mean a logical drive within
the extended partition. To try to cut down on the confusion just a little,
I usually try to use the term "volume" to mean either a primary partition or
a logical drive, either of which is assigned a "drive" letter and can be
formatted.
What you want to do can be accomplished by using Disk Management to first
delete your existing Drive D:. Then you can create two new primary
partitions using the newly-unallocated space. You can assign drive letters
D: and E: (or any other letters you choose, except C
and format those
volumes. Or you can create an extended partition using that space, then
create two logical drives within that extended partition. If you click View
and choose to see the Graphical Display, you can see a picture of what you
are doing after each step of the process.
You can, of course, choose how much physical disk space you want to include
in each partition and/or logical drive. You can, of course, leave some of
your hard drive unpartitioned, and you can leave some of the extended
partition unassigned to any logical drive. All these choices are up to you,
depending on how you want to manage your drives. (I've left about half of
my "monster" 120 GB third HD unallocated so that I can create new logical
drives for a "sandbox" to try new things - like Longhorn; I can delete those
volumes when I'm done with them.)
Naturally, you'll want to assign your CD/DVD drives letters far out in the
alphabet so that you don't trip over them as you add and reorganize hard
drives and volumes on them. The BIOS has its own system for assigning drive
letters anew each time we reboot; Windows has its own default ideas for how
the letters should be assigned, but it will try to preserve our choices if
we use Disk Management to specify how we want them.
RC
