Most laptops and desktop factory models come built in with only one drive no matter how huge your hard drive is. This can be pretty annoying when you want to re-format your PC, in those cases you may first have to move all your data to a external drive before performing a fresh install.

Windows Vista has a nice little feature which will allow you to create partitions from unused space without having to use any additional tools or softwares.

Creating partition in Windows Vista is quite easy and you need to follow few simple steps and you will end up with a new partition where you can store your files without having to worry about backing them up when you have to re-format or re-install your operating system.

To create partitions from unused space in Windows Vista follow these simple steps, open Control Panel –> System and Maintenance and scroll down till you see Administrative Tools. From the options available click on create and format hard disk partitions.

Clicking on that will open up a new window where you can see your current hard drives.

In the above screenshot you will see two drives, but that is since I already have partitioned my drive. If you have not you will only one drive usually the C drive. Right click on the drive and select the Shrink drive option.

Once you select the option Windows will start querying the drive to see amount of free drive space available to create partitions.

Once Windows has finished querying the hard drive it will show the amount of space available to shrink in the drive, enter atleast 1-2 GB lesser than the available space to shrink and click on the Shrink button.

The 1-2GB space is to leave a buffer so that nothing goes wrong while creating the new partition. Give the process some time to complete and you should see a new drive available in the hard drive.

The task is not complete yet you will need to format the drive and assign it a drive letter, to format the drive right click on it and select the format option.

You will see a new window pop up from where you can specify the name for the drive and the file system, choose NTFS as the default file system. You can perform a quick format on this drive since it was already partitioned by your computer maker earlier.

If a drive letter is not assigned to the new drive you can do so by right clicking on the drive and selecting change Drive Letter and Path and follow the instructions to add a new drive letter.

That’s it once you follow the above steps you should have a brand new drives to store files, music and movies without having to worry about having to move those files while re-installing or re-formatting your PC.