Formatting an External Hard Drive

[danbob]

I have a western digital 1tb external. My passport, usb 3.0. Just bought it. I formatted it to fat32 so that the ps3 could see it. But now 4gb and bigger files dont fit. Is it possible to have two partitions, one with fat, the other with ntfs?

If so, would i be able to make this second partition without deleting the files on the hard drive? And what program would you recommend to use for this job?

Thanks

 

[Gunbuster]

Partition magic? Not worth the money though. Pull the files off, nuke the partition, recreate with multiple partitions.

 

[lxskllr]

PartedMagic

http://partedmagic.com/doku.php

Boot to the CD, and run Gparted to create new partitions.

 

[blankslate]

EASUS Partition Master should be able to do it, without having to boot from a CD

There's a freeware version which is quite capable or most tasks.

including converting a partition from FAT32 to NTFS

 

[Netopia]

If you have Windows 7, you can do it all with Windows.

First, defrag the drive.
Then go to the computer management console.
Select Storage -> Disk Management
Select right click on the partition and select "Shrink Volume"
Once that partition is the size you want, select the free space and add your new partition
Format as NTFS.

No 3rd party software needed at all.

 

[Dstoop]

Pretty much what everyone else said.

I have a half FAT, half NTFS external drive hooked up to my Wii. Works like a charm.

 

[Netopia]

If you do want to use a third party tool, then MiniTool Partition Wizard is about the best of the FREE ones out there. I've used it on everything from desktops to servers without issue. I've run through MANY of these programs over the years.

Whatever you do though, it will be a LOT faster if you first defrag. If you don't, then the program (any program) has to move all of your files to the partition that you are keeping before it can actually do anything else. I like partitioning software to be running for as short a period as possible (since there is always the possibility of trouble) so I defrag first to speed things up.

 

[danbob]

Ok. Thanks for the suggestions. I am still running windows xp. Problem, i backed it up. Wiped it. Created two new partitions ntfs, fat32. When i try to copy a file over to the ntfs portion. The status bar comes up. Shows its doing something. The total time to transfer continusouly rises. No files are ever transferred. Not sure whats wrong.

 

[EagleKeeper]

Did you just create the NTFS partition or also format it?

What happens when you try to copy using the Command Prompt?

 

[danbob]

I formatted the entire drive. Than added two new partitions. One ntfs and the other fat 32.

Transferred afile. 7gb. Looks like its transferring.Let it run for a while. It shows a few green bars for progress. But still 100 minutes left. Why is it so much slower now?

 

[EagleKeeper]

Drives are to be formatted after partitioning

 

[danbob]

So I plugged the hard drive into my asus n66. It allows me to transfer big files. Makes no sense.