Tech Tip of the Day: How to shrink and create a new partition

Description: This document will show how to create a new partitioned "Hard Drive" from your existing drive.

Ever feel like space is becoming an issue on the C drive (Solid State Drive maybe?) or there is certain files in which rather than having them on the C drive and taking up space - would rather put them somewhere else? Maybe the computer has two hard drives or one drive that has a large amount of space on the computer that the user would like to split up and make more organized or keep certain files in?

Well, this is how to do so - by taking an existing partition and shrinking it down to a certain size. Once this has been done, the user is able to create a new volume and create in a sense, a new "Hard Drive" on the computer to put documents and files on that is separate from the other drives.

1. First, click the Start button in the bottom left and go up to Computer - right click and left click on Manage.
   
   


2. Now Computer Management window should have come up on the screen, select Disk Management on the left hand side.
   
   


3. As shown, the user will want to find their disk drive that they wish to shrink - right click on the healthy partition and go down to Shrink Volume.
   
   


4. Once Shrink Volume has been selected, this pop up should appear in the middle of the screen.
   
   


5. Next, the user will want to determine what size they want the new volume to be, thus choosing the amount of space to shrink. Remember: 1024MB = 1GB. So in this case, we’ll do 10GB of space: 10x1024 = 10240MB. Once the user has entered in the amount to shrink, click the Shrink button.
   
   


6.  Now, there should be an unallocated space showing as connected to the drive. This is now useable space that can be partitioned.
   
   


7.  Right click anywhere in the unallocated space and select the option for New Simple Volume.
   
   


8. This window should pop up - simply click Next to get the process started.
   
   


9. Leave this set to the default that it comes up as - this will be the default max amount of space in MB. Click Next and Next again.
   
   


10. Again, leave the page default unless the user chooses to change the Volume Label or File system. Click Next once all changes have been made.
    
    


11. Now the wizard is finished, click Finish for the partition process to complete.
    
    


12. The user should be welcomed by a New Volume in Disk Management and also an AutoPlay pop up window showing a new drive has been found.
    
    


13. Click Start and click on Computer, now the new drive should be viewable. Now the user is free to use the drive as they please.
    
    


14. Now, to delete the new volume if the user chooses not to use this or adds another drive - simply go back into Disk Management. Right click on your partition and go down to Delete Volume. The volume will now be deleted and show as unallocated space as it did before.
    
    


15. Now, right click on the main drive it was coming from and go to Extend Volume.
    
    


16. The user should be greeted by the popup above. Click Next on this popup and click Finish to finish the process.
    
    


17. Back to normal!
    
    

For more assistance contact Technical Support here.

Tech Tip of the Day: How to configure a RAID volume on an Intel motherboard

Description: This guide will walk through how to create a RAID volume on an Intel motherboard. Most Intel motherboards will support RAID 0 or RAID 1. RAID, or Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks is a technology that provides storage reliability through redundancy, combining multiple hard disk drives in to one logical unit wherein data is stored in multiple copies across multiple hard drives.

There are many types of RAID but the two most common are RAID 1 and RAID 0. RAID 1 is a duplicate drive, essentially Drives 1 and 2 will be exactly the same. This is done so that if either of the two drives fail, an exact copy of that drive is readily available.

Example:
Drive 1: File A, File B, File C, et cetera.
Drive 2: File A, File B, File C, et cetera.

RAID 0 is in fact not really RAID at all because it is not redundant. RAID 0 splits a file in to pieces and puts some of the pieces on Drive 1 and some on Drive 2, to increase speed. The theory is that if Drive 1 reads the first part of File A, and Drive 2 reads the second part of File A, the information is actually read twice as fast and thus the computer is twice as fast. The major downside is that this actually doubles your susceptibility to hardware failures as if one drives fails, all of the information is lost.

1. Make sure two hard drives are connected to the motherboard and are connected to the power supply.
2. Enter the standard BIOS by pressing the F2 key repeatedly on POST.
3. Once in the BIOS go to the Configuration tab, then select SATA Drives
   
   


4. Within the SATA Drives heading set the Chipset SATA Mode to <RAID>
   
   


5. Save changes and Exit.
6. After the settings have been saved, power down the machine
7. Power on the machine and immediately begin tapping the Ctrl key and the I key repeatedly. This will access the RAID BIOS.
8. The RAID BIOS will show both drives connected to the system. In this menu select Create RAID Volume
   
   


9. Select a Name for the volume and press the Tab key
   
   


10. Select the RAID type (0 or 1) using the up or down arrow keys and press Tab again.
    
    


11. Press the Tab key through the rest of the options until you get to the Create Volume option and press the Enter key.
    
    


12. A data loss warning will appear when creating a new volume: All data will be lost on both drives. Press the Y key to create the RAID volume.
    
    


13.  The two drives will show in a RAID once this is complete. Press ESC then Y to Exit the RAID BIOS then install your operating system on your drives which are now in RAID.
    
    

For more assistance contact Technical Support here.