The Samsung N310 comes with a generous 160GB hard drive, with Windows XP installed on it. However you may find you want to divide up that space, so that you can keep your data files separate from your Windows files, or maybe even add another operating system, such as a Linux distribution. To do this, you will need to partition your drive, however, unlike Windows Vista, Windows XP does dot enable you to resize an existing partition, using the Disk manager, so you will need to use a third-party tool A good, free partitioning program is Paragon Partition Manger 9.0 express, which you can download here.
Before making any changes to your hard drive though, you should ensure your data is safe, by having a backup, preferably on an external hard drive, or optical disk. You can use Windows backup to do this (found under All programs, Accessories, System tools) or use a free program such as Syncback, which is much more flexible, and which can be downloaded from http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html. Once you have backed up your data, then you can run the partitioning tool. The first step is to resize the existing partition, which will be labelled as Local Disk or Windows.
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Depending on the software you use to partition the drive, the exact procedure will vary, but once you have selected the partition you want to resize, you will either need to type in a figure for the new size (in Megabytes) or drag a slider. If you have to type the figure in, then remember that 1GB is 1000MB, so to reduce the 160Gb partition, to 100GB, leaving 60GB of space for the new partition, you would type, 1000MB as the new size.
Now you have resized your Windows partition, you will need to create a new partition in the empty space. You need to create a new logical partition and decide how much space to allocate, which unless you intend to create further partitions, should be the maximum space available. Once the new partition has been created, you will need to format it and give it a label.
It is recommended that you format the drive using the NTFS file system, which will give better performance than the older FAT32 file system. That’s it! You have successfully reduced your Windows partition in size and created a new partition which will appear in My computer.
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