How to Partition an External Hard Drive Quickly?

What Does Partitioning External Drives Mean?

It means slicing the storage medium into sub-sections of its whole. In layman's terms, you are simply dividing the hard drive storage space into multiple sections for better data management. Most drives, internal or external, are pre-formatted with a single partition. However, some partitions are more compact than others. Therefore, during partition, we need to ensure data security beforehand.

Why Partition the External Drive?

Generally, users segment the space of the external drive. Because then it becomes easy for the user to analyze the space he has to spare. Some other beneficial reasons to partition drives are as follows:

• Data can be handled in an organized manner, streamlining its management.
• Possibility of better data protection, since the OS is separated physically from files.
• Also, data and files can be stored as per the preferences in the respective drive.
• Moreover, it acts as a backup if files get corrupted or lost due to system errors.

How to Partition External Hard Drive?

In the following section, we will discuss two methods to partition hard drives. Also, we will see how we can recover our data if lost or damaged.

Use Disk Management for Manual Partition

Just follow these steps to resolve your issue:

1. Connect your Hard Drive to the system using a USB Cable.
2. Next, click on Start, type Disk Management, and press Enter.
3. The disk management dialog box appears. Right-click on External Hard Drive, click Delete Volume and remove the partition.
4. Further, if you have some crucial data then click on Shrink Volume.
5. Windows will automatically select the maximum data and then click on Shrink.
6. Right-click on unallocated or free space on the drive and select New Simple Volume.
7. Now, enter the needed volume size in megabytes in Simple Volume Size in MB box.
8. Enter a small number so that you can allocate the remaining space in further partition.
9. Furthermore, if you want to convert Gigabyte into Megabyte then multiply the number by 1024
10. Once you are done with allocating the space, click Next. Windows will assign an available drive letter.
11. Afterward, from the File System drop-down list either select FAT32 or NTFS and click Next.
12. Once the partition is done, click Finish.

Partition External Hard Drive Using Command Prompt

Another manual way to partition your drives is using the Diskpart commands. It is simple and in just a few steps completes the partition. However, this process may take time to complete depending on the size of the drive. Remember, the steps can’t be undone, once executed. Follow the below-given steps to use this utility:

1. Open the Command Prompt on your system.
2. Type ‘diskpart’ and press enter. Further, type list disk > Enter.
3. Next, type select disk 0 (Replace 0 with the number of your external drive.) Press Enter.
4. Subsequently, type clean > Enter.
5. Finally, type create partition primary size = *** (specify size) and hit Enter.
6. Now, you need to assign the drive a letter. Type assign letter = ** (specify required letter) and click Enter.

You can repeat the same steps if you want to do further partition of external hard drives. In addition, despite being free, manual methods are lengthy, and even a small mistake can corrupt the whole hard drive. Once the drive gets corrupted, it is very hard to get data back from the drive. That’s why, it is essential to keep a backup or try other solutions to recover data

Best Tool to Recover External Drive Data

The SysInfo Windows Data Recovery software helps to fix errors and recover data from the partition table. If your drive encounters an inaccessible error after you partition an external hard drive, then this tool can help access files. It has several features, such as:

• Recover data from corrupt drives easily and quickly.
• It is compatible with all the versions of Windows OS.
• Also, provides advanced settings for backing up data files.

Steps to Restore External Hard Drive Data

1. Download and install the tool on your system. Run it as an administrator.
2. Select the drive from which data needs to be recovered. Click Next.
3. You can preview the selected volume. Hit Next to continue.
4. Afterward, select recovery mode to fix your drive and click Next.
5. A window appears with all directory files. Select the folders to recover and click Next.
6. Further, specify the destination path to restore your files. Click OK.
7. At last, hit the Save button.

Conclusion

Hopefully, you have learned how to partition external hard drives. It can be done manually and if by any chance, the drive gets damaged then opt for a professional tool. It will recover your lost or damaged data without much hassle. Try and apply these steps, and the issue for which you are here will be resolved easily.