Dividing Your Hard Drive into Two Volumes

As we mentioned earlier, most hard disks consist of just a single volume that takes up the entire disk, and that volume is almost always drive C. However, it’s possible to divide a single hard disk into two (or more) volumes and assign a drive letter to each—say, C and D.

Why would you want to do such a thing? Lots of reasons, but two are by far the most common:

• You want to install a second operating system on your computer and dual-boot between them. In this case, you need to create a second volume and install the other operating system to that volume.

Image For information on dual-booting, seeDual- (and ...

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