For example, in this example, a hard drive that's described as a 240 GB drive by the manufacturer, is shown to have only 223.56 GB by Windows. Usually you can do it by the total size of the disk displayed, although it may be confusing. The most important thing when using the Disk Management tool is to make sure you can identify the disk you want to manage in the list. Password-protect and hide personal files and folders with Folder Guard for Windows 11,10,8,7. Because with Disk Management it's very easy to destroy your partitions and lose your files, if you don't know what you are doing. (If you have Windows 7, run Windows Explorer, right-click on Computer, choose Manage from the menu, then select Disk Management under Storage.)īefore you continue, first things first: Disk Management is a very powerful tool, and with great power comes great responsibility! If you are not very experienced with computers, you can look, but better not touch and let someone more knowledgeable to do the job. If you have a newer version of Windows, such as Windows 11 or 10 right-click on the Start Menu, and choose Disk Management from the menu displayed. It's easy to open Disk Management, but the procedure is slightly different in different versions of Windows.

The way to do such tasks in Windows is to use the Disk Management tool that comes preinstalled with Windows. However, what if you want the drive to be prepared differently? For example, you may want to re-format the drive, or change the partitions that it has. If you've bought an external drive in a store, the preparation has probably been already done by the drive manufacturer. How to delete a protected EFI system partition with Windows 11, 10, 8, or 7Īs you probably know, in order to be able to store files on a hard drive, it needs to be prepared first: it needs to be initialized, partitioned, and formatted just the right way.

Disk management win10