MiniTool

MiniTool Partition Wizard Professional is a partitioning application which helps you administer the partitions on your hard drive, offering a complex set of functions such as creating/deleting, resizing, merging, converting partitions, and many more.

The application is user-friendly, its main functions being organized in such a manner that they are easily identifiable on the toolbars and action panels displayed on the main screen.

The freeware version of this little disk partitioner is all you'll need to handle your disk space, though if you want to take an even greater chance of screwing your system up there is also a "pro" version which allows you to do scary things like changing cluster sizes or hiding and unhiding partitions.

It has a very straightforward and easily understandable graphical interface which shows you exactly what space you have on your disk, and what it's used for, which is most often going to be a combination of NTFS and Linux partitions with possibly some unallocated space.

If that made no sense at all, "partitioning" is a way of dividing up your big physical hard drive into imaginary, or "virtual" drives, each called a partition. This can be very handy, especially with today's huge hard drives, as you can easily create a drive E, F, G and right through to Z if you feel like it. Each one could be allocated a different use, or even a different operating system, allowing you to run various versions of Windows side by side (oh joy!) or, more often, to run Windows and Linux alongside each other. Even just having one virtual disk for movies, one for games and so on will make your life easier when negotiating up to a terabyte of data on the most recent drives. Your computer will see these imaginary disks as being real, and will display them in your file manager exactly the way your C: drive is displayed, and you will use them the same ways. The only limitation is in Windows, where I believe the first operating system must be on drive C:, but otherwise any virtual drive has the same features as a physical one.

In the past, partitioning has been the domain of experts and the technically competent amateur. The risks of partitioning a drive by someone unsure of what they're doing, and often struggling with obscure and complex software, have been serious. A foolish mistake, or clicking "go" at the wrong moment, will wipe an entire drive or corrupt everything on it, just like that. So a small and simple tool such as this one is pretty handy. I've used it myself to repartition the drive on my little laptop here, three or four times lately, and it just does the job and that's that. It will handle all the basic needs, reformatting and resizing and moving partitions around as you please, and it does it quickly and successfully in my experience. A nice bit of freeware, in fact.

However, with all partitioning software must come a big WARNING that you should backup everything first, or at least, all your valuable data. Not that anyone bothers, but you really should. And if you hit the "go" button, and you didn't backup your stuff, and you shouldn't have hit the "go" button, it will really suck. So, as with most good partitioning software, this one allows you to mess around with what you think you want to do as much as you like, but it won't apply any of the changes until you specifically tell it to do so. It's recommended that you choose what you want to do, go have a cup of tea, come back, and only if you still want to do what you thought you wanted to do, should you do it. I'm probably being way too overprotective here, and just dividing up your disk without introducing different formats and operating systems isn't at all difficult, but it's best not to do your learning the hard way first.