Whether you're installing Windows on a brand new hard
disk or simply adding a new disk to an existing system, it's a good
idea to consider how you want to use the new storage space before you
begin creating volumes.
If your goal is to set up a large space for backup or media storage,
for example, you might want to devote the entire disk to a single
volume. On the other hand, if your plan is to establish two or more
separate volumes—perhaps one for each family member on a shared home
computer, for example—decide how many gigabytes you want to assign to
each partition.
1. Installing
Windows on a New Disk
When you run the Windows 7
Setup program on a computer with a single, raw hard disk, Setup
presents you with a screen identifying the disk and its size. If you want to create a single
volume encompassing the entire disk, click Next to proceed. Otherwise
click Drive Options (Advanced). On the screen that follows, you can use
the Size control to specify how large a volume you want to create for
your Windows installation:
If you decide not to use
the entire disk for Windows, you can create additional volumes from
within the Setup program. But there's no particular need to do this.
After you have installed Windows, you can use Disk Management to create
one or more additional volumes
in the unallocated space remaining on the disk.
2. Adding a
New Disk to an Existing Windows Installation
In the graphical pane of
Disk Management, a brand new hard disk, whether internal or external,
appears like this:
To make this disk
available for storage, you need to create one or more volumes, assign
drive letters, label the volumes (if you don't want them to be
identified in Windows Explorer as simply "New Volume"), and format the
new volumes. You can carry out all of these steps from within the New Simple Volume
wizard.
2.1.
Specifying Volume Capacity
To begin,
right-click anywhere in the rectangle marked Unallocated and choose New
Simple Volume from the shortcut menu. The New Simple Volume wizard appears. Click Next
to get past the welcome page. On the Specify Volume Size page, you'll be
shown the maximum and minimum amounts of space you can devote to the
new volume:
The wizard doesn't
give you the option of designating volume space as a percentage of
unallocated space, so if your goal is to create two or more volumes of
equal size, you might want to do a bit of arithmetic before going on.
Here, for example, if you wanted to split the disk into two equal
partitions, you might enter 119236 in the Simple Volume Size In MB box.
2.2.
Assigning a Drive Letter
After you have
specified the desired size in megabytes and clicked Next, you will be
given the opportunity to assign a drive letter to the new volume. Note that the letters A and B, which used to be reserved for floppy disks, are
no longer reserved:
2.3.
Formatting the New Volume
The Format Partition
page, which follows the Assign Drive Letter Or Path page, gives you a
chance to do just that but does not require that you do so. If you
prefer to wait, you can always do the formatting later (right-click the volume's
rectangle in the graphical pane of Disk Management, and choose Format
from the shortcut menu.) Figure
25-1 illustrates the Format Partition page.
Your choices are as follows:
File System For hard disk volumes larger than 4 GB (4096 MB), your only
options are NTFS (the default) and exFAT. If you are formatting
removable media such as USB flash drives or a writable optical disc,
other file systems are available.
Allocation Unit Size The allocation
unit size (also known as the cluster size) is the smallest space that
can be allocated to a file. The Default option, in which Windows 7
selects the appropriate cluster size based on volume size, is the best choice here.
Volume Label The volume label identifies the drive in
Windows Explorer's Computer window. The default label text is New Volume. It's a good
idea to give your new volume a name that describes its purpose.
Select Perform A Quick Format if you want Disk Management to skip the sometimes lengthy
process of checking the disk media. Select Enable File And Folder
Compression if you want all data on the new volume to use NTFS compression.
(This option, which you can also apply later, is available only on NTFS volumes.
The wizard's final page
gives you one more chance to review your specifications. You should
actually take a moment to read this display before you click Finish.
After Disk Management has done its work and the disk formatting is
complete, a dark blue bar appears over the new volume in the console's
graphical pane:
If your disk still has
unallocated space (as the disk in this example does), you can add
another volume by right-clicking that part of the display and choosing New
Simple Volume again.
