Complete Guide To Manage A Partition, Create A New One Or Extending A Partition Using Aomei Partition Assistant

The most important part of a Computer is the Hard Drive. Well, I am not talking about resources but I am talking about importance to you only. Hard Drive is the place where you store years of your work, if they are lost – you are lost too. So changing anything in this Hard Drive is a risky business and you should not do anything except you have the clear idea of what you are doing and also have the best and perfect tool to perform an action. Aomei Partition Assistant is one of the most powerful partition manager tool I have ever used. It allows you to create and manage partitions easily because it will let you know what it do before doing so you don’t have to do anything without knowing what the end result of the operation. It can manage all partition (except for the System Reserved partition) that means you will be able to Resize/Move a partition, Merge it or Allocate Free Space, make a duplicate of that partition by performing a copy disk quickly or completely duplicate that partition using Sector-By-Sector disk copy (leaving not a single byte behind). You can also create/delete/format a partition, change drive letter, hide a partition or even convert a logical drive to a primary partition and more. Check after the fold.

Most of the viruses that attacks on your computer attempts to destroy files that are located on the same partition where the operating system is installed. Because of this, having an exclusive partition for Windows is an excellent idea. After all, if it has a different letter "C :/" - and the virus is "dumb" and do not know to look for in other partitions - you can be much safer. Of course, not all viruses is done simply for bragging operating system files, there are several types which do other types of things. So keeping your antivirus updated is the best way to prevent unwanted infections. There are other reasons for you to create some backup hard disk partitions. So there are many reasons why you might want/need to create, remove, or resize partitions on your hard disk and Aomei Partition Assistant helps you with this task. It is a free for personal use application that manages your Hard Drive partition easily and professionally.

To get started, install Aomei Partition Assistant and then run it. The software interface is well-organized and easy to use. It has a two panel layout, the left panel lists all tools and wizards for easy one-click access. The main area (or the right panel) shows a chart as well as list of consisting all partition of your HD. To manage a partition, simply select it from here and then pick-up a tool from the left panel. Alternately, you can also right-click on the partition to access to the context menu which also has those tools.

In Resize Partition tool, you can simply resize a partition to a smaller size and leave the rest of that partition as unallocated space. Note the bar where driver letter and number for the total space of the partition are written. You will find the both sides of this bar drag-able that serve to indicate the free space before and after the selected partition. There are also three fields indicating Unallocated space before, Partition size and Unallocated space after showing respective details.

Once you have left some unallocated data space on a partition a new item will appear in the partition list which indicates that you can create new partition here. Through it, you can create a new partition, right-click and select Create. Then put necessary details like the partition label, Logical/Primary partition, file system, partition size etc.

Merge Partition will allow you to merge several partitions in one. You can merge up to three partition at once into one. Select the middle partition and then you will be able to merge the previous partition and the following partition with it.

The Split Partition let’s you create two different partition for one single partition. Just like the Resize Partition tool, you will see a draggable bar letting you create two partition. The main deference between Resize Partition is it will let you create two partition from one in a single step while through Resize Partition you need to leave some unallocated space and then create new one from that space.

Copy Partition let to copy a partition in a new unallocated space. You can also perform Sector-By-Sector backup of a partition in a new disk using this tool. Sector-By-Sector takes long time but it leaves not a single byte of a single sector behind. Really a powerful tool to clone a disc.

Create Partition, Delete Partition, Format Partition, Change Label, Change Drive Letter respectively does what the name says. As those are usual tool, I am not demonstrating more about them. The Convert to Primary tool allows you to convert any logical partition to a primary partition. Primary partition have higher priority over logical ones. Wipe Partition let’s you delete and then re-delete and re-delete data of any partition for a pre-determined number of times. Check Partition let’s you check your partition using CHKDSC.EXE. You can also check for bad sectors in a partition from here.

As mentioned, there are 3 Wizards in the left panel. The first one naming Extend Partition Wizard let’s you extend any partition (Including System Partition) without deleting any data. When you open it, you will get two options, one is Extend system partition and the other is Select any partition from any hard disk to extend. Choose what you need here and then click Next. Whatever the choice, you must indicate which unit will receive the increase and indicate which of them will lose and how much space it will be. When you create a partition out of unallocated data, you can name it as you wish and also indicate the type of partition and file system.

Now from the next window, check from which partition you are going to take space. Try to take space from the closest partition as it will take less time.

From the next window, determine how much space you are going to add. There’s a minimum and a maximum size for that partition and you can extend the partition upto that limit. Once you finished, Click Next.

Now on the next window you will be shown a detailed summary of what Aomei Partition Assistant is going to do to complete the action. Please make sure to verify this before proceeding. Although you can allocate new space to a partition from any part of the HD, the closer those are, the smaller and the faster the process will be.

Make note that it will be a real long time process to do this because Aomei Partition Assistant will have to go through a lot’s of copying, deleting, splitting and creating for this. For example, you have 5 partitions and if you are going to add some space to the very first one of them from the last one, Aomei Partition Assistant is going to first Shrink the last volume for unallocated space, then move the volume to that space to leave blank space and this follows with the all 3 other partitions you are not willing to change. In our test we used a 150 GB backup hard drive. It had only 3 partition and we tried to add 10 GB from the last partition to the first partition. Before that, we use a defragmenter to facilitate the separation of the disk partitions. Yet we had to wait almost 45 minutes to complete the process and the computer was functional during this.

The second Wizard is Disk Copy Wizard which I have already said in Disk Copy tool. The Partition Copy Wizard is also same as the Disk Copy Wizard while the only difference is that you can copy partitions individually from here.

No matter for why, but managing or creating partition is sometimes a must do task for a computer user. Because of not having proper knowledge and guideline as well as using buggy programs, many people have also lost their years of job while changing partition. That’s the reason I decided to go through a whole guide about managing a partition, creating a new one, cloning a disk and other’s. Here I used a brilliant freeware tool called Aomei Partition Assistant. Aomei Partition Assistant works on Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista and I also slightly tested it on Windows 8 Consumer Preview. Try this tool and I am sure you will be pleased. If you have any questions or confusion about anything regarding this guide, please leave a comment here.

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