Most PCs, with Windows installed, already have two or three partitions. Usually, your drive has one main partition (C:) which amounts to most of the physical space available on the hard drive. The others are used for recovery and maintenance purposes.

Simply put, while the physical disk is a single entity, creating one or more partitions can slice it into a number of drive with different letters (D, E,F) and which can make daily computing all that more easier. If you must know, the operating system treats each of these partitions as separate drives.

But why would you want to create partitions? Anyone who has will know how much of a hassle it can be.

As mentioned earlier, one good reason to have partitions is if you want to run two operating systems namely Linux and Windows. Another would be to separate system and data if only for backup purposes.

In other words, you can leave Windows among other programs on C: while all your music, documents, videos and pictures can go on D: drive. It goes without saying that the latter will have more space allocated to it.

Of course, you can backup your Windows environment by creating an image of your C: drive but this file will be large if you don’t partition the physical drive. And this is why separating your libraries and programs is a good idea since using a backup program will not be tedious.

Yet before you think about partitioning, make sure you get expert help or you can risk losing data as a result.