In this short tutorial I will show you how to partition your external hard drive. There are many reasons for people to want to do this. A few days ago a distant relative of mine came over with her daughter’s 320GB external hard drive and wanted to share storage space with her daughter. She asked me to partition it in a way so that her daughter gets 200Gb of a partition, and she gets the remaining space. Others however, like my younger brother and twin sister prefer to partition their external hard drives according to their file category. E.g., movies will have a partition of its own, documents, music, pictures, etc. Strange enough, I do not partition my portable hard drives. I simply separate all my files in individual folders. But to each his own.
Download a free partition software. I suggest Easeus Partition Master Home Edition which is a very user-friendly freeware. You can download it directly from CNET Download, or from Partition Tool. After downloading the freeware, install it on your computer.
For this example, I will partition my 320Gb external hard drive.
1.] Backup everything on your external hard drive and transfer the backup to another storage device. Ensure the backup and transfer has been successful.
2.] Format your external hard drive. You can do this by visiting ‘My Computer’ on Windows, and by right-clicking the drive you want to format. In this case, right-click your external hard drive and then click on format. Keep the settings at default, but select ‘quick format’. This should be completed in a few seconds or minutes.
3.] Run Easeus Partition Master Home Edition. Select the drive you want to partition:
4.] On the sidebar’s Operations menu, select “Resize/Move partition”. You should see a new window that looks like this:
5.] Note that there is 1024 megabytes in 1 gigabyte. So if you need one of the partitions to be 200GB you will have to set it to 204800 megabytes. Type this up next to ‘Partition Size’. You will see a small popup message saying “Locking Size”.
6.] If you go back to the main dashboard, your partition will be set to a “Pending Operations” and if you’re ready with this setting you can click on the “Apply changes” button above. However, if you would like to partition the unallocated space then view the next step.
7.] To partition the unallocated remaining space, click on it and then select ‘Create partition’ on the sidebar menu. You don’t need to give it a Partition Label but this is up to you. You can then click on the ‘Ok’ button.
8.] The partitioning of your external hard drive is complete. You should now see two or more partitions when you insert your external hard drive on the USB port and they should have the set allocated space.
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