Advice on partitioning drive to seperate OS from user data

[sosborn]

Hi,

My daughter's Cosmos II came with a single hard drive. I would like to create a new partition on this drive to store user data so that Win 8 can live on its own C: partition making it easy to image and restore the OS without affecting user data. On previous family PCs I've done this using BootIt Next Generation or BootIt Bare Metal as it is called now. Its always been easy to do and has got me out of various scrapes in the past with a simple restore of the OS partition.

However I'm cautious about diving in and do in the same because there appears to already be more than 4 partitions on the hard disk and some kind of parition management going on that I don't understand (part of Win 8 which I'm new to?)

Does anyone have experience of doing this on Win 8 PC Specialist machines? Any advice?

Thanks,
Steve.

Laptop Spec:

Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 15.6" Matte HD LED 16:9 Widescreen (1366x768)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i5 Dual Core Mobile Processor i5-4200M (2.50GHz) 3MB
Memory (RAM) 4GB SAMSUNG 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 MEMORY (1 x 4GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 740M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Hard Disk 750GB WD SCORPIO BLACK WD7500BPKX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 16MB CACHE (7200 rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 8x SATA DVD±R/RW/Dual Layer (+ 24x CD-RW)

 

[mipsman]

The volume labelled C: is the one with windows on.

You can shrink this volume using the Disk Management tool in windows 8, then add new volume in the space it frees up and format it.
I have done this once on a friends PC, so not a lot of experience, but it worked ok.

There's a tutorial here: http://www.tweakhound.com/2013/01/02/how-to-resize-your-windows-8-partition

You should back up your hard drive first.

 

[sosborn]

Thanks for the reply. Have you (or has anyone) tried this on a recent PC Specialist machine? I ask because normally you can't have more than 4 partitions on a disk (which it already seems to have) without some special software to manage this. If you then use a different bit of software (like Windows) to add a new partition things could get in a mess. This is what I'm worried about.

Thanks,
Steve.

 

[steaky360]

If you've not got anything drastic on the laptop just now, I would suggest maybe reinstalling windows and setting up the partitions as you like when you do the clean install. That way you can have the laptop set up as you'd like.

 

[TheGSL]

Nice to see someone else reads Tweakhound ... ;-)

The volume labelled C: is the one with windows on.

You can shrink this volume using the Disk Management tool in windows 8, then add new volume in the space it frees up and format it.
I have done this once on a friends PC, so not a lot of experience, but it worked ok.

There's a tutorial here: http://www.tweakhound.com/2013/01/02/how-to-resize-your-windows-8-partition

You should back up your hard drive first.