It’s very important that you select “Do not format this volume” unless you feel comfortable doing so.Your operating system will have likely chosen D or E as your drive letter, but you can change it to whatever letter you would like.Once you decide how much you want to partition, click to the step that reads “Assign Drive Letter or Path” However, if you do create more than one, you should know that they will be considered as different drives within your system.ħ. You can also have several partitions if you want.If you choose this, then the amount you are partitioning will be the same as the total space you have set aside on your new hard drive.A default size is usually chosen for you and is labeled “Simple volume size in MB.” If everything has gone correctly so far, you should see the same value in the “Maximum disk space in MB” field.Click next and then choose the size of drive that works for the file types you have and how much space you need Once you know which space you want to use, right-click and choose the “New Simple Volume” option for Windows 7 and 10, orĦ.You will then have to decide how much space you want to partition and the volume you will need for your files and performance. Then, follow the same steps to begin the partitioning process. Note: If the drive is not installed correctly, then it will not show up and you will need to restart your computer and reinstall the hard drive. It will usually be labeled “Unallocated” if you have never used it before. Next, find your new hard drive from the Disk Management window and select it. Choose GPT if your new drive is 2TB or biggerĤ.You will need to choose which partition style will work best for your new hard drive after beginning the process.

For Windows XP, you will have an “Initialize and Convert Disk Wizard” prompt insteadģ.Don’t be concerned if the window doesn’t pop up it does not necessarily mean that there will be a problem down the line.Once this is open, you will see a message that reads, “You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it” For more advanced users, Disk Management can be accessed in the command-lineĢ.If you have a later version, you will want to go to the Power User Menu.First, navigate to “Open Disk Management,” which is included in all versions of Windows For an operating system, you should consider a clean install. When you are partitioning a hard drive, you are really preparing it for the files that will be stored on it.

Initialize drive d as gpt or mbr