AOMEI Partition Assistant
Will Partitioning a Drive Erase the Data?
Will partitioning a drive erase the data on the disk? If you need to repartition drive to make partition allocation more reasonable, you can try methods in this post.
By Lucas / Updated on May 12, 2023
Will partitioning a drive erase the data on the disk?
Most PCs are shipped with only one partition on the internal disk. However, keeping your data, applications, and operating system on the same partition is risky. Thus, partitioning your drive is necessary to classify and protect your data.
You may need to repartition a utilized disk for using more available space. When you repartition a disk, you change the partition size, drive letter, and file system. In general, you should repartition a disk in the following circumstances:
• Resize the space on the disk
Repartition might simply expand existing partitions to meet your new requirements. Resize to produce unallocated space, then build a new partition with that space or add it to another partition that requires space.
• Dual OS
If you want to install dual-boot operating systems, you must do the partitioning. To store the operating system, you'll need at least two major partitions that are large enough and formatted with distinct file systems.
• Set a new disk for install OS
Before installing and using a new operating system, a new drive must be partitioned. Occasionally, this action resolves the problem of a hard disc not being detected while installing Windows.
How to partition a drive in Windows
If you want to repartition a used disk then you’ll erase data at first. But if you just want to adjust the size of existing drives, then your data might be safe, depending on which tool you’ll choose.
In Windows, you can use Disk Management to do some simple adjustments if your disk meets the requirements of this tool. Of course, you can also try a third-party tool to break the limitations of Disk Management.
In this part, we’ll show you both tools to partition a drive.
Way 1. Adjust partition via Disk Management
Right-click “This PC”, and select “Manage” to open Disk Management. You’ll see all partitions and drives and other necessary factors of your devices.
▶ 1. If you want to extend a drive:
If there is unallocated space adjacent to the partition you want to extend, you can do the extending.
Step 1. Right-click the partition and select “Extend Volume”. Follow the wizard to perform extending.
Step 2. In the new window, you can type the size you want to add to the target drive.
Step 3. After confirming the settings, you can click “Finish” to over this task.
◤ Note: If there is no contiguous space next to that partition or even no unallocated space on that disk, the “Extend Volume” will be greyed out.
▶ 2. If you want to shrink a drive:
Step 1. Right-click the target partition and select “Shrink Volume”. You should be able to shrink the partition.
◤ Note: Disk Management only allows users to shrink the target drive to half of the partition size.
The space you shrank from the existing drive will show as unallocated space. You can use it to create a new partition.
Way 2. Repartitioning a drive with a third-party tool
As you see above, Disk Management has some limits that might impede you to partition your drive. It doesn't allow users entirely repartition a drive, you'll have to remove all existing partitions to make unallocated space. Or you can't flexibly adjust the size of the drives.
Thus, to get rid of those limits of Disk Management, you can try AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional, a Windows manager for all Windows PC.
With this versatile tool, you can flexibly partition drives securely and quickly.
Allocate free space—Users can directly share the free space from one drive to another, so they can quickly extend drive space without any limits.
Split partition—Users can directly create a new partition with the available space on a drive.
Merge partition—Users can merge two adjacent drives into one, or merge nonadjacent unallocated space into another drive.
If you want to partition a new disk, the “Quick Partition” can help you set all information and make this disk bootable.
Let’s see some details. We’ll take the “Split Partition” feature as an example. With only a few clicks, you can have a new drive from your single drive.
Step 1. Install and run this tool, right-click the drive you want to split to create a new partition.
Step 2. Drag to set the size of two drives, or you can type the size of the drives.
Step 3. Click “Apply” and “Proceed” to execute the task. If you adjust the C drive, you might need to reboot your PC to finish the change.
After the reboot, your disk will have a new partition, then you can move installed programs or some large file folders from the C drive to your new drive to keep your OS has more available space to store more necessary data in the future.
Final lines
Will partitioning a drive erase the data on the disk? It really depends on what tool you use. AOMEI Partition Assistant doesn’t have many limits compared to Disk Management and operations are easy for all users.
Besides the features we’ve mentioned, it can also convert system/data disk to GPT/MBR without data loss, change file system without formatting, clone disk, migrate OS, and so on.
