PARTITION YOUR HARD DRIVE

While Windows’ own Disk Management tool can partition, it’s not always able to free up all available drive space due to the placement of files at the end of the drive. Instead, you need a thirdparty tool, and the good news is there are many free tools out there to try. One such tool is Paragon Partition Manager Community Edition (www. paragon-software.com/ free/pm-express).

First, work out how to divide up the available drive space—if most of your data resides in your user folders, open File Explorer to C:\

Users, right-click your user folder and choose Properties to find out how large it currently is. Look to give your data partition this amount of space, plus a minimum of 20GB, depending on how much drive space is available.

Launch Paragon, creating recovery media when prompted. Once done, select your Windows partition (typically drive C) and click ‘Check file system’, tick both boxes and click ‘Check now’, rebooting when prompted. Once back at the desktop, reopen Paragon and select drive C again, except this time choose ‘Move or Resize’. Use the ‘Unallocated space after’ slider to free up enough space for your data partition, then click ‘Place in queue’.

Now, select the unallocated space that appears and choose ‘Create volume’. Change the volume label to ‘Data’ and click ‘Place in queue’ again. Once done, click ‘Apply (2 operations)’. Review your changes and click Apply. A progress box will step you through the process, and once complete your data drive will show up in File Explorer under This PC, ready to receive your user folders.

Note: don’t worry if the drive isn’t allocated letter ‘D’ because the letter has already been taken by another drive (your DVD drive for example)—it’ll be allocated that letter after Windows has been reinstalled from scratch.