Partition help!

Ahadi

Ahadi

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Hey guys, I need some help partitioning my external hard drive.

I have a few questions first off:
1) Can I partition my external HDD without losing any info that's already on it?
2) I'm using Vista. Can I have one partition as NTFS and the other as FAT32?

I have a 110 gig hdd, and about 40 gigs are being used at the moment. I want to create about a 35 gig partition. Can anyone please help me out, maybe put up a link to a step by step instructional, or perhaps just post a step by step for me?

Thanks a bunch.
 
1) Yes. Make sure you've error checked and defragmented it.
2) Not sure, don't have Vista, but it should, it's versatile as long as you don't turn it into Ext (Linux).

A lot of partitioning software will do everything for you in a couple of clicks. It's reintegration after it's done that's the hard part.
 
Thanks for the quick responses. Is PartitionMagic free?

So for not losing my data that's already there, when I'm at the partition prompt, I select how big I want the partition to be, then let it format?
 
In PM you look at a bar that is representative of your HD. Some is used and the rest is free. Then you choose how much of the rest of the bar you want to format and to what file system to format it to. Then you accept the pending changes and it does its thing.
 
Partition Magic is not free. There is a partition manager installed with Windows (you have to dig deep in Control Panel to find it, Adminstrative Tools>Disk Management), I mostly use this, but you've got to be careful with it. I tend to go with a couple gigs extra on the 'used' partition, you never know.
 
[quote name='VioletArrows']Partition Magic is not free. There is a partition manager installed with Windows (you have to dig deep in Control Panel to find it, Adminstrative Tools>Disk Management), I mostly use this, but you've got to be careful with it. I tend to go with a couple gigs extra on the 'used' partition, you never know.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for this. I'm doing this right now. I went with the "shrink" option. I'm shrinking part of my drive down to what's being used rounded up to the nearest ten (so 60 gigs) and I'm going to create a 40 gig partition. Thanks so much for this help.

PS, you guys wouldn't be PS3 guys that have done this same thing for their system?
 
Maybe it's just me, but I've had horrible luck with Partition Magic. If you only have 40GB of data, just copy it over to another hard drive, then do a clean format on the external drive. And IIRC, Vista's interface won't allow you to format anything over 32GB in FAT32, you'd have to go into the Command Prompt. When I had to do it, I used my Macbook since it didn't have a problem with it for some reason. If you don't have to worry about Macs, I'd even recommend formatting with exFAT instead of FAT32, but it really depends on how you plan to use your drive.
 
ALWAYS back up your data when you plan on partitioning a hard drive. No software is 100% guaranteed to work, and I imagine you don't want to lose the info you have.
 
Here's what I've done thus far:

I've formatted half of my hdd into fat32. I'm now moving over my video files from ntfs to the fat32. I then plan to copy those on to my ps3, then do a complete format of the external drive to complete fat32 so I can stream videos from the hdd to the ps3.

Edit: And I have backed up the important stuff.
 
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