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Summary: Partitioning and formatting a new disk, internal or external, is often not needed but it's easy to do using Windows built-in disk manager.
Well, to begin with, you may not need to. Most come pre-formatted as a single partition. But if it didn't, or if you don't like the default setup, changing it is easy. And of course you'll want to do this before you load that disk up with data. • As I said, most external hard drives come ready to use. Just plug 'em in, let Windows discover it, and *poof* there's another drive on your system ready to use. Most will come pre-configured as a single unlabelled partition using the FAT32 filesystem. If that's what you have, and if that's what you want, you can stop reading now, since you're done. You need do nothing more. "... most external hard drives come ready to use."
If you want to change what you have, the tools you need to do so are already right there in Windows. Start by right clicking on My Computer and then clicking on Manage. In the resulting application window, click on Disk Management in the left hand pane. You should see something similar to this:
At the top you'll see all the logical disks on your system listed alphabetically by label by default. Below that you'll see a graphical representation of all the physical disk drives known to your system. If a physical drive has more than one partition those partitions will be shown together on the single physical drive. In this example, my drive "E:" is an external USB drive. It happens to be my backup drive where nightly backups are stored. Remove the Existing Partition Let's assume for a moment that I'm unhappy with the current configuration of the partitions on my external drive and want to change it. My first step would be to remove the existing partition. You need to right click on the drive in the lower pane, and you should see this menu:
Click on Delete Partition The representation of the drive should change from "Healthy" to "Unallocated". Partition The Drive Right click on the drive again, and the option that was once "Delete Partition" is now "New Partition". Click on that to set up your new partition. You'll then be asked to select "Primary" or "Extended" partition. Primary is sufficient unless you plan to put more than 4 partitions on this hard disk. You'll then also be asked how much of the space to allocate for the new partition you're creating. Typically, I recommend simply allocating the entire space to a single partition. You can, if you like, allocate less than the maximum space to the partition you're creating now so that you have room for additional partitions on the same hard disk. Remember that each partition, once formatted, will appear as its own logical disk (C:, D:, E: and so on.) You'll then be asked about formatting, which I'll cover below. Once you've formatted the new partition, it'll appear as "Healthy", and any leftover space will continue to display "Unallocated". You can then repeat this partitioning process on that unallocated space until your entire drive has been allocated. Format Your Drive Assuming that partitioning has been performed above, or you don't want to change the partitioning of your drive, the next thing to change would be the format of the drive.
Right click on the drive that you wish to format, click on the Format item, press OK on the dire warning, and you'll get a dialog similar to this:
Let's look at each of those options:
That's it. Press OK and after a period of time you'll have a formatted, ready-to-use disk. A Word on Disk Partitioning Utilities As you've seen, the process we used above to adjust the existing partitions on the hard disk involve deleting the entire contents of the disk, changing the partition structure, and then placing the disk back into service. It may not have to be that way. There are third party utilities such as Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director that will allow you to resize partitions without first erasing the disk. Of course I still recommend a full backup of the disk you're about to modify first, but these can be useful utilities. Here's why I'm not suggesting them: how often do you really repartition a disk? In my mind it's much more common to do it once, and then leave the configuration alone. A change is typically so infrequent that the utilities - however good they are - often aren't worth the effort. However, that's obviously a decision you can make on your own, since it's a classic time / money tradeoff. But particularly for a new disk just being placed into service, there's no need for advanced management tools. Once it's empty, and while it's empty, it's a perfect time to perform any partitioning or formatting or the like using Windows own built-in tools. Related:
• Recent Comments
Nice lesson leo , thanks for your creativity in articles and explanations. Try booting with (horrors) the 98SE Emergency Startup Disk and use (gulp) FDISK. I realize that DOS is beneath contempt, but it has its uses, even now. NTFS is not all it's cranked up to be. FAT32 works very well and any Microsoft OS can read FAT32, except maybe 3.1. Slave drives using FAT32 are transportable between or among other Microsoft PCs with, in my experience, no problems. I didn't know about this RSS search. You answer all the "BASIC" questions I have been wanting to get answered all the time. Thanks. Thanks a lot.I have tried the above method but delete partition menu is grayed out.I logged in as administrator.Can you suggest any other solution? All I can think of is that you likely cannot delete the system partition while it's in use. Thus you may have to boot from another media (much like what it takes to reformat the system drive). -Leo Posted by: Vinayak at July 30, 2008 11:49 AM Post a comment on "How do I format and partition my new external hard disk?":
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