Page 873 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

capacity of your main hard drive—by installing a second hard drive that masquerades as a folder on
the first one.

For details, see the free PDF appendix to this chapter called “Turn a Drive into a Folder.” It’s on
this book’s “Missing CD” at missingmanuals.com.

Partition a New Drive

The vast majority of Windows PCs have only one hard drive, represented in
the This PC window as a single icon.

Plenty of power users, however, delight in partitioning the hard drive—
dividing its surface so it appears on the screen as two different icons with
two different names. At that point, you can live like a king, enjoying the

following advantages (just like people who have two separate hard drives):

You can keep Windows 10 on one of them and Windows 8.1 (for

example) on the other, so you can switch between the two at
startup. This feature, called dual booting, is described on “POWER

USERS’ CLINIC Dual Booting”.

You can keep your operating system(s) separate from folders

and files. In this way, you can perform a clean install of Windows
(“The Upgrade to the May 2019 Update”) onto one partition
without having to worry about losing any of your important files or
installation programs. Or you can keep your files safely on one

partition while you install and reinstall different operating systems,
or different versions of them, on the other.

Now, in earlier Windows days, partitioning a hard drive using the tools built
into Windows required first erasing the hard drive completely. Fortunately,

Windows’ Disk Management console can save you from that hassle,
although making a backup before you begin is still a smart idea. (The short
version: Right-click the disk’s icon in Disk Management; from the shortcut

menu, choose Shrink Volume. In the Shrink dialog box, specify how much
space you want to free up, and then click Shrink. Then turn the free space
into a new volume, as described next.)