I hv window vista business edition OS. I purchased 500 GB seagate external hard drive as I wish to transfer my collection of songs and photos from my laptop to hard drive. How do I partition the hard drive in three parts. It comes with integrated software for backup and I have registered on net with seagate.I am not been able to backup my files. No funny answers plz.
Minitool Partition Wizard will make it easy for you.
Best Free Partition Manager for Windows | MiniTool Partition Free
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What happened when you 1st plugged in the drive ?
You should have gotten at least 1 or 2 popup messages.
Please post a picture of Disk Management with the external drive plugged in and powered up.
Use the paperclip icon at the top of your next reply to add the pic :)
Hey,
And welcome to Tenforums,
So If I understood correctly you are looking for a way to partition an external drive for backing up your PC. Here is how to partition a drive using Windows Default Partitioner, although there are many many many third party ones that might do the job better, but I usually stick with the original default windows one.
1st Make sure the Drive is indeed installed an connected to your PC
2nd Open Run with "Windows Key+R" and type or copy in: "diskmgmt.msc" without the -"- markings and press ok
3rd In order to partition your drive you must make sure you have backed up everything thats currently on it.
4th Select your drive you would like to partition and right click it
5th Shrink The volume by as much as you would like your second partition to be
6th Once the partition has been shrunk make sure to select the unallocated space and right click New Simple Volume
7th Set up your new volume by assigning a letter and a format FAT32 or NTFS (NTFS recommended) and click next
8th Set up the additional settings and make sure to select format with these settings.
9th Once finished you will have your new "drive" available for file storage or for backing up
Repeat this process for your other partition make sure to shrink the main volume instead of the already shrunk volume. That should be it. Report back afterwards
Why can't you backup? To backup, all you have to do is drag and drop files to the new drive once it is plugged in and recognized on the computer.I am not been able to backup my files.
As stated, go to Disk Management, if you have saved all the files you want off of this new HDD to another drive, and are not planning on using their backup program, then you can Right click the partition in the lower pane of this window and Delete all the partitions on the drive, Now that the drive is all Unallocated Space, you can right click that and choose to make a new Simple Volume. Here, choose 1/3 of the size of the External HDD (ie) 160GB or whatever size you want a partition to be and choose Quick Format NTFS, now create two more 160GB Partitions or whatever size is left.
You can also use a 3rd party app, as have been suggested, like Minitool.
Hi,
It should be fine but you should or could use the minitool mentioned in the #2nd post which might have a better way of formatting, because usually windows formats the drives to a minimal state and with probably the mini-tool could do much better, but its your choice.
OK downloading it, I hope mini tool will make it easy for me.
The process and the format are the same, it's no better or worse, whether you are using the Windows tools or thru a 3rd party app.
Well I personally, only use Windows Diskmanagement but there is one HDD that I got from a friend which was formatted via a software and it seemed like it had just a tiny bit more space on it, but still it was not really noticable.
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