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I purchased a HP laptop recently with Windows 10 home edition. The complete 1 TB hard drive is partitioned into one partition. I want to partition it into multiple partitions without losing the OS.

Is it possible? How can I do it?

Krishna Chaitanya
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  • Yes. It can be done with any partition management software. And if it is truly 1 partition you can probably do it with windows disk management. Backup your data first. – Appleoddity May 28 '19 at 12:34
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    Possible duplicate of [How can I shrink a Windows 10 partition?](https://superuser.com/questions/1017764/how-can-i-shrink-a-windows-10-partition) – Appleoddity May 28 '19 at 12:36
  • It has only one partition `c:`. It is a new laptop which came with Windows 10 and no data yet. Can you please explain how to do with Windows disk management – Krishna Chaitanya May 28 '19 at 12:36
  • I cannot. Because it is already explained many times online and I have specifically linked to a duplicate question with multiple descriptions of how to do this. – Appleoddity May 28 '19 at 12:39

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Yes, this is possible, depending on how much free space you have left. If you have little free space left, it is still possible but becomes very cumbersome. Given that you have ommitted how much of the 1TB is still free space, I will assume you have plenty of space available.

You first want to open Disk Management. This can be accessed by right-clicking the start menu, and selecting Disk Management.

Here you see a list of all the harddisks and their partitions installed.

Select the C partition in the graphical display. Right-click it, and choose Shrink partition.

A popup will come up asking you how much smaller you want to make the partition.

Change its size to the new desired size and hit OK (the smallest you can select is the sum of all files currently present on the C drive. It is highly recommended to keep at least 5% (or 50GB) of free space available on the C drive.).

The partition is now small. The free space can now be repartitioned.

Right click the new unpartitioned space, and select New simple volume. Hit next, next, next, next, finish and it creates a new partition with the full remaining size, and assign a driveletter to it. Feel free to alter the data during the dialogs to fit your needs, such as the driveletter and the label.

And that's it!

If you have only little room to create a new partition, keep in mind that Disk Management itself cannot move partitions. Other partitioning tools can though. It is advised to copy the data to an external drive and remove it from the main drive to free up space before making the above change.

And as always, be sure to have backups in case you accidentally screw up. The actions above can actually cause your windows to not work if you don't follow them 100% exactly as described above.

LPChip
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  • Note: If Disk Management refuses to resize to the entered amount, try a larger one. Do not force the resize by using third-party tools. – harrymc May 28 '19 at 19:56