Partition external hard drive

Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

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Hi Evan,

You need to use a program like PartitionMagic (at least version 7)
to non-destructively change your partitions.

Ciao . . . C.Joseph

That which a man buys too cheaply . . .
He esteems too lightly

kidzmatter2me@gmail.com wrote:
> Hi. I have an external hard drive that I have been using for about 3
> months. I am using a system with Windows XP home. I would like to add a
> partition to it for backup, but can't seem to find an answer to my
> problem. What I need to do is create a new partition on the drive
> WITHOUT using Fdisk due to the lack of a floppy drive in my laptop. I
> have tried to use the Windows XP Disk Management utility, but when I
> right click the drive, no option is presented for adding a new
> partition. Can anyone help? Thanks!
>
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Archived from groups: comp.sys.laptops (More info?)

Evan wrote:

> Thanks for the help! I suspected that I needed to delete the
> partition. There is no data on the hard drive that I can't get back,
> so I can safely delete it. I had looked at Partition Magic, but I
> can't spend any money right now. Thanks for the help!

You don't need to spend any money. Just use fdisk, a command line program which
creates or removes partitions. It's part of DOS, but I don't think it's
included in modern Windows systems. I'm sure you can download it though.

I prefer the Linux version of fdisk, which is more flexible, and actually easier
to use. You can create any filesystem you want except NTFS. You can get it by
downloading a Linux boot/repair/rescue disk, which runs Linux from a floppy or a
CD, so you don't have to worry about harming your C: drive. You can repost this
question to a Linux newsgroup to get better answers on how to do this.

The advantage of Partition Magic is that it can resize partitions on the fly, as
long as they're contigious, and there's enough contigious free space. Other
than that it's unnecessary, unless you like paying $70 for the convenience of a
graphical program.

Matt O.