[Bluefire101]

Disk partitioning is the creation of separate divisions of a hard disk drive using partition editors. Once a disk is divided into several partitions, directories and files of different categories may be stored in different partitions. More partitions provide more control but too many become cumbersome. The way space management, access permissions and directory searching are implemented depends upon the type of file system installed on a partition. Careful consideration of the size of the partition is necessary as the ability to change the size depends on the file system installed on the partition.

Some Reasons Why You May Partition The Harddrive

1. It's needed to have an operating system on it

2. Having cache and log files separate from other files.

3. To multi-boot (Having more than one OS on the computer)

4. Protecting or isolating files, to make it easier to recover a corrupted file system or operating system installation. If one partition is corrupted, none of the other file systems are affected, and the drive's data may still be able to be recovered.

The Main File Systems Used Today.

NTFS: NTFS means "New Technology File System" and is the main file system used by Windows NT and up (Win2k, WinXP,Windows Server 2003/2008 and Windows Vista).

NTFS is a file system made by Microsoft which was made in 1993. The features of NTFS are Alternate Data Streams, Quotas, Sparse Files, Reparse Points, Volume Mount Points and a lot more.

However not every filesystem is perfect, NTFS comes with limitations as well

1. Theoretically Files can only be as big as 16 EiB (Exbibyte) but a limit of 16 Tib (tebibyte) are only supported.

2. File names can only be 255 characters long

3. An absolute path can be 32767 characters long while a relative path can only be 255 characters long.

4. Alternate Data Streams

Windows system calls may—or may not—handle alternate data streams. Depending on the operating system, utility and remote file system, a file transfer might silently strip data streams. A safe way of copying or moving files is to use the BackupRead and BackupWrite system calls, which allow programs to enumerate streams, to verify whether each stream should be written to the destination volume and to knowingly skip offending streams.

5. NTFS uses the same time reckoning as Windows NT: 64-bit timestamps with a range from January 1, 1601 to May 28 60056 at a resolution of ten million ticks per second.


FAT(FAT12, FAT16, FAT32

FAT stands for File Allocation Table and was also developed by Microsoft for DOS and the DOS based Windows OS's (Windows 3.0, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows ME etc) Made in 1976/1977.

The plus about FAT is that it's supported by basically almost any operating system out. And also its usually the file system thats on every single solid-state memory card (SD, Thumbdrives, etc) but it's usually FAT32(aka VFAT).


HFS+

HFS Plus (Hierarchical File System Plus) is developed by Apple in 1998 and is the main file system at the moment for the Mac OS 8.1 and up to Mac OS X

The limitations are that the max file size is 8 EiB, Can have an unlimited amount of files in it, max filename length is 255 characters, Max volume size is 16 EiB,

Characters in file names: Unicode, any character, including NUL. OS APIs may limit some characters for legacy reasons

ZFS

ZFS is a file system used by Sun's OS called Solaris and also used on Linux and BSD. Also it recently is being supported as a file system for Mac OS X and the file system is open-source.

Limits:

Max Filesize: 16 EiB
Max Volume Size: 16 EiB
Max characters in file name: 255
Maximum Number of Files: 2(to the 48th Power)

Now that I've covered some most used file systems let's get on with the tut.

Open the Start menu and right-click on "Computer" and click Manage

A window will pop up, there should be a bunch of categories in the left most window. open the category called Storage. Double click on the application called Disk Management

Disk Management Console displays the details of all available volumes and disk drives in the computer configuration in the right pane.

Right click on any volume or partition that needs to be resized or changed in size, and select either Expand (to increase the size) or Shrink (to reduce the size) to change the size of the partition.

Enter the amount of space to expand or shrink in MB (cannot exceed the size of available expand or shrink space in MB).

Click on Expand or Shrink button when done.

Windows Vista will reduce or extend the size of the partition online immediately, without the risk of data loss.


There ya go ^^

[xibo]

<-- would rather die then to format a partition to zfs

in fact you can always resize *any* partition of *any* kind by deleting it and creating a new one of same type / attributes at the same starting sector - then not formating it, so the original contents will remain.

vfat != fat32.
fat32 can only have file names with 8 pre and 3 post-dot ascii ( not ansi! ) characters in is otherwise crappy, too. fat32 formating was only supported by windows 3, 3.1, 3.11 and for workgroups... microsoft just didn t feel the need to change some strings in the windows code.

[Bluefire101]

I already said VFAT was FAT32 >_>

[dragonnite]

There is one more format that developed by microsoft and currently it's one vista sp1 only. It's called exFAT. From it's name, this format was developed from FAT32 and we can call it FAT64. But only windows vista can read this format.

Anyway beside the windows utility, you can change the partition by third party program like partition magic, etc. But if you use third party program make sure if that program can read the partition made of by windows or not. (because some program called broken partition, etc). The basic to use it (in this case partition magic) is almost the same as the windows one.

But one thing you must always remembered before change the partition (with all application) just backup your data. Even it's said it was safe but it's not 100% safe. (You don't want master file structure to corrupt or partition corrupt right ?)

[xibo]

partition magic doesn t resize your partitions though. it makes a image/backup of it, deletes it, creates a new partition and replays the backup, which is a process that can be made directly due to the partitioning process not affecting partition contents physically.

exfat isn t that new, and its also pretty crappy, even when compared to otherwise 'bad' filesystems like ntfs or ext3fs. see [Only registered users can see links. ] ...