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Hard drive disk partitioning is one action that you should not avoid. It helps you organize your data and can avoid major catastrophes, such as loosing all your precious data.

To those who do not understand partitioning, read the Wikipedia article Disk Partitioning [Wikipedia]. A partition is basically an organized sector on your hard drive acting like a single drive. For instance, C: is the most popular Local Disk partition. Many people also have D: as a back up drive/partition. When you partition (verb) your hard drive, you are splitting up your disk into more drives.

What’s the purpose of this? Many:

1.) Prevent Catastrophes- Most of us have already experienced computer failures in combination with huge data loss. If you haven’t, you’re either really really really lucky, or… I don’t know why else you haven’t had failures… But anyways, partitioning your disk can prevent such problems. By separating your precious data, such as pictures, from your Windows drive (usually C:), you can avoid the failure of Windows affecting your pictures. Basically, if your Windows goes bizark and corrupts, it can not harm data on another partition. Thus, you would be able to boot up with, say, a live Linux CD and then copy all your safe data in that nice little partition you made.

2.) Organize and Navigate Better- By partitioning your hard disk into many drives, you organize your data more aesthetically. For instance, you can have a Media (M:) drive for all your pictures, videos, and music; a Documents (D:) drive for your documents; a Programs (P:) drive for your programs; etc. Splitting your disk into such drives help you organize much better and has an overall more beautiful appeal. In addition, it won’t take you forever to navigate to your pictures.

3.) Partitioning is coolz- So if you wanna be cool, partition your hard disk!

Personally my preference for partitioning is this (This is my opinion of the best way to partition your hard drive disk):
Documents (D:)
Media (M:)
Programs (P:)
Windows XP (C:)

What to use-
There are plenty of partitioning tools out there. I personally use Acronis Disk Director. There are Microsoft Disk Management, Partition Magic, Partition Manager, and of course those nifty programs and application that you illegally download from torrent networks. Just Google for partitioning tools. We have a Google engine on the top-right part of the sidebar. Or go legitimately buy the software from the companies. Good luck to y’all.