Partition external hard drive

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

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!

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

Evan <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!
>

You can't add a new partition because there's already a partition there,
which takes up the whole drive. You'll have to delete the existing
partition if you want to get anywhere with the Windows utility. Of
course, if you don't want to lose that data (or you don't have a place
where you can copy it temporarily), you'll have to use a program like
Partition Magic, as suggested by another poster. It can alter
partitions while leaving the data intact.