Overview of Partitioning Disks

Before you can format disks into volumes that applications can access, you must partition them. Windows 7 provides flexible partitioning that you can change even after you have formatted a volume. However, it's still important to plan ahead when creating partitions for features such as BitLocker Drive Encryption, which has very specific partitioning requirements.

Note If Windows discovers a problem with a volume, it might schedule ChkDsk to run the next time the computer starts. Large volumes, especially volumes bigger than a terabyte, can take a very long time to check-more than an hour. During this time, the computer will be offline. Therefore, when you plan the size of your partitions, consider the time required for Windows to perform a ChkDsk operation at startup.

The sections that follow describe how to partition disks in Windows 7.