How to Split Partition in Windows 8 or 8.1 without Losing Data?

Why you need to split partition in Windows 8?

When you buy a new computer, most of the time there is only one partition on the hard drive (usually the C drive). So the operating system and the programs that come with Windows are installed on the C drive. After a period of time, a lot of personal data will also be installed to the C drive. Therefore, systems, applications, and personal data are all on the same partition. Different contents in the same partition makes the partition very messy and inconvenient to manage.

More importantly, since everything is on one partition, if a virus or other failure occurs in the partition, data will be lost. For the system and applications, we can restore them by reinstalling. However, for personal data, if you don’t back it up in advance, you may not be so lucky.

Therefore, if you have multiple partitions, and different partitions store different data, you can manage the partitions more flexibly. To have more partitions, the easiest way is to split the only partition.

Split partition in Windows 8 with Disk Management

After knowing the reason for the split partition, now we come to learn how to split partition in Windows 8. Disk Management is a Windows built-in tool for managing disks. It can create, expand, shrink and format partitions. Next, I will demonstrate the detailed steps of using Disk Management to split partition.

Step 1. Press “Windows + R” on the desktop and enter “diskmgmt.msc”.

Step 2. In the main interface of Disk Management, you can see the situation of all disks and partitions on your computer. If you want to split the C drive, you can right-click partition C and select “Shrink Volume”.

Step 3. Enter the shrink size in the pop-up window and click “Shrink”.

Step 4. Now you can see that a piece of unallocated space has been generated behind partition C. You can right-click this unallocated space and select “New simple Volume”.

Step 5. Then follow the instructions to create a new partition.

As you can see, Disk Management can easily perform split partition. But please note that it has some limitations:
1. If there are unmovable files on the partition, you cannot shrink the volume to a position smaller than it.
2. Disk Management can only shrink volume of the NTFS file system, if it is FAT32 or exFAT, it cannot shrink volume.
3. In addition, when you use Disk Management to extend the partition, the Extend Volume may  gray out.

Maybe you want to ask, “Is there any other way to split partition in Windows 10, 8, 7”? The answer is yes, there is a professional third-party software that can help you solve these problems.

Split partition via professional partition manager

AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional (support Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP users), one of the excellent partition managers on the market. It perfectly makes up for all the shortcomings in Disk Management, you can split any file system partition. And the shrunk space can directly generate a new partition with a drive letter, so you don’t need to create a new partition again. More importantly, it is easy to operate, GUI allows you to fully understand at a glance.

Besides split partition, if you want to figure out issues such as “how to do partition in Windows 8.1 after installation”, “how to partition a hard drive in Windows 8 without losing data”, “how to extend partition in Windows 8”, you can use Quick Partition, Create Partition, Merge Partition or Allocate Free Space to achieve your purpose.

Notes:
1. Split the system partition will reboot your computer.
2. The MBR disk will only support up to 4 primary partitions. If you need more partitions, you can convert primary partition to logical partition, and then, create more partitions. Or you can convert MBR disk to GPT disk first.

Step 1. Launch Partition Assistant. Right-click the partition which you want to split, select “Split Partitions”. (Take C partition as an example)

Step 2. In the pop-up window, drag the border to specify the size. 

Tips: You can tick “Allow partition alignment to optimize the performance of SSD” if the partitions are on an SSD drive.

Step 3. Now you can see the change has been represented in the main window. Click “Apply” to confirm the change.

This is the whole process of split partition in Windows 8. You can create a new partition in just three steps.

Final words

There are two ways to split partitions in Windows 8 in this post, including Windows built-in tool and third-party software. You can choose freely. By the way, if you want to use AOMEI Partition Assistant in Windows Server, you need to upgrade.