Basic Partitions
You can create primary partitions, extended partitions, and logical drives only on basic disks. Partitions and logical drives can reside only on basic disks. You can create up to four primary partitions on a basic disk or up to three primary partitions and one extended partition. You can use the free space in an extended partition to create multiple logical drives. You must be a member of the local Administrators group or the backup operators group, or else the proper authority must be delegated to you (if you are working within an Active Directory environment) to create, modify, or delete basic volumes.
To create or delete a partition or logical drive, you can use the diskpart.exe command-line tool or the GUI and perform the following steps:
- Open the Disk Management console.
- Perform one of the following options:
- Right-click an unallocated region of a basic disk and click New Partition.
- Right-click an area of free space within an extended partition and click New Logical Drive.
- Right-click a partition or logical drive and select Delete Partition to remove that partition or logical drive. Click Yes to confirm the deletion.
- When you choose to create a new partition or logical drive, the New Partition Wizard appears. Click Next to continue.
- Click Primary Partition, Extended Partition, or Logical Drive and answer the prompts regarding disk space allocation and so on as requested by the wizard to finish the process.
You must first create an extended partition before you can create a new logical drive, if no extended partition exists already. If you choose to delete a partition, all data on the deleted partition or logical drive is lost. You cannot recover deleted partitions or logical drives. You cannot delete the system partition, boot partition, or any partition that contains an active paging file. The operating system uses one or more paging files on disk as virtual memory that can be swapped into and out of the computer’s physical random access memory (RAM) as the system’s load and volume of data dictate.