a partition is just a segment created on your harddrive where you can store information such as you OS, and all of your programs and stuff.. No partition = no files..
You can also create multiple partitions so they remain seperate segments on your harddrive so you can duel boot like xp, and vista. and it act as 2 seperate hard drives!
Partitioning divides up your hard drives into smaller sections. This can really keep your information organized on your hard drive. If you only wanted to allot a certain amount of space, let's say for music, you could partition off 100 GB that would be 102400 MB, on your hard drive and nothing else will be written on that partition except music files. Partitioning can also optimize your hard drive by isolating a section of your drive that would most likely become fragmented such as a partition for the pagefile. If you have a seperate partition for your pagefile as opposed to just using the space on the entire hard drive, the partition with the pagefile will only be affected.
You can either set up partitions when you first install your operating system for the first time in the bios or if your os is already installed on your hard drive, right click on my computer, go to manage, choose disk management and then click on the drive you want to partition. Follow the instructions in the Patritoning Wizard. There should already be one partition for the operating system. You will be able to create several little partitions from the same hard drive. Remember the size of the drive you want needs to be imputed in megabytes (MB) not gigabytes (GB). So in order to convert GB to MB you need to multiply the GB size by 1024 (which = 1 MB). A 30 Gb partition should be inputed in as 30,720 so that it will show up as 30Gb.
P.S. I initially had trouble inputing the partition size in because I was using the numbers keypad on my keyboard. When I switched to using the numbers at the top of my keyboard the partition size would input properly.
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