How to Partition an External Hard Drive

Ultimately a day arises in every computer user's life when he falls short of storage space on his hard drive. It doesn't matter if he started with 500 GB or 1 Terabyte of space, eventually it's all going to be used up with movies, music, photos and personal files. The only solution is buying extra room for your data in the form of an external hard drive. Once you get hold of your brand new external hard drive, one of the first tasks you might want to perform is partitioning of the whole drive into volumes for easy classification and storage of different types of data.

Either this or you may already have an old external hard drive, which you intend to format and repartition into new volumes. Whatever be your intention, this Buzzle article will show you how to partition external hard drive without losing data on a Windows 7/Vista/XP or Mac OS X based machine. As you will discover when you read further, the partitioning of an external hard drive is an extremely simple exercise.

Why Partition External Hard Drives?

A good question to ponder upon is why go into all the trouble of partitioning a drive into multiple volumes? Why not use it as a single volume drive? Well, you can obviously use it that way, but there are certain virtues of splitting it into more than one volumes. Firstly, the benefit of having more volumes is that it makes classification and segregation of data simpler.

One volume can be wholly devoted to storing movies, another for music and still another can contain your work related stuff. Another advantage of partitioning a drive into separate logical volumes is the freedom that it provides you to install separate operating systems, which can be booted into alternately. Let me now elucidate the extremely simple procedure of partitioning hard drives.

Partitioning an External Hard Drive in Windows

If you are partitioning your old external hard drive into brand new logical volumes, you need to back up the existing data on the drive first. That's because, once partitioning is done, all the data on the drive will be erased completely. So use the existing space on your computer's internal hard drive to back up the data temporarily.

Step 1: Open Disk Management
Log in through an Administrator account. Connect your external hard drive with your computer using a USB cable or the appropriate connecting interface. On your Windows 7, Windows Vista or Windows XP OS, right click with your mouse on the 'My Computer' icon on the desktop or the 'Computer' listing in the Start tab at the left hand bottom corner.

A drop down list will open. Click on 'Manage' to open the computer management console. There will be list of management option in the left hand window. Click on 'Disk Management'. You will see a list of all the existing storage device volumes that are currently accessible. In it, you will see the external hard drive volume too.

Step 2: Delete Existing Volume
At the bottom, you will see the external hard drive listed. Right click on it and choose 'Delete Volume' first. This will wipe out all the stored data on the external hard drive. So make sure you have backed up all data.

Step 3: Create New Simple Volume
After deletion, the drive will be marked as 'Unallocated Space'. Once you have finished deleting the volume, right click on the now unallocated disk space and choose 'New Simple Volume'. Once you have done that, you will be asked to specify amount of disk space from the unallocated total space, which you intend to assign to that volume. Specify the value in Mega bytes or Giga bytes and provide a drive volume label.

Check the 'Format Volume' check box and select the file system (NTFS recommended) to format and erase all previous data, during creation of new volume. Finalize settings and execute the action by hitting 'Next' and then 'Finish' button. You must allocate less than maximum disk space for each volume to leave space for other volumes. This will finish the creation of one volume.

Step 4: Repeat Procedure For More Volumes
To create more volumes, right click on the left over unallocated space to create more volumes and repeat the above procedure until all space is used up. That concludes the partitioning exercise. Your external hard drive is now ready with multiple drive volumes to store your data.

Hard Drive Partitioning in Mac OS X

Let me now explain how partitioning of an external hard drive should be done on a Mac OS X system. It is considerably simpler compared to the Windows procedure. Connect your external hard drive with your Mac using a USB or FireWire cable.

Step 1: Launch Disk Utility
Launch the 'Disk Utility' program. Back up your data before partitioning. It will show a list of all the existing drive volumes on the PC, including the ones on the internal hard drive or external hard drive. Select the external hard drive volume and click on the 'Partition' tab on the right hand side of the application.

Step 2: Choose Volume Scheme
Below 'Volume scheme', in a drop down list that says current, select the number of partitions you intend to create. According to the number of partition volumes you create, the drive will be automatically divided into logical volumes with equal storage space allocated. If you selected two partitions in the volume scheme, now two separate volumes will be displayed, whose attributes, you will have to select now.

Step 3: Choose Name and File Format
Click on each of the volumes and provide a name. Also select the file system format for each one of them (Mac OS Extended Journal is recommended). Once you are done with selecting the attributes, hit the 'Apply' button to get the volumes created. Hard drive formatting will automatically occur.

This concludes the partitioning routine! Attach your external hard drive to your Windows or Mac based operating system using the appropriate attachment cable and let the partitioning begin!