Partition external hard drive

[Guest]

I just got a new Maxtor 250GB external hard drive for my video editing work. It was formatted for FAT32 and I wanted to change it to NTFS. I also wanted to make a small partition on the drive to install a couple of my editing programs.
Instead of using Maxtor's software, I used XP's disk management utility. The instructions said to right click in an unallocated space to do the partitioning, but I could never get the "Partition" option to come up... only option about partitioning was "Delete Partition". I saw no Partitioning Wizard. So I went ahead and formatted in NTFS and thought I could partition it afterwards. But now I've found that partitioning has to come first.
My question: If I do the "Delete Partition", can I go back then and partition it into two parts and then reformat? There is nothing on the drive, so all I would lose would be time at this point. Thanks for any help.

 

[dglock]

you will have much better luck using an app like partition
magic. the xp option is very limited.
don

-----Original Message-----
I just got a new Maxtor 250GB external hard drive for my

video editing work. It was formatted for FAT32 and I
wanted to change it to NTFS. I also wanted to make a
small partition on the drive to install a couple of my
editing programs.

Instead of using Maxtor's software, I used XP's disk

management utility. The instructions said to right click
in an unallocated space to do the partitioning, but I
could never get the "Partition" option to come up... only
option about partitioning was "Delete Partition". I saw
no Partitioning Wizard. So I went ahead and formatted in
NTFS and thought I could partition it afterwards. But now
I've found that partitioning has to come first.

My question: If I do the "Delete Partition", can I go

back then and partition it into two parts and then
reformat? There is nothing on the drive, so all I would
lose would be time at this point. Thanks for any help.

 

[CS]

I just got a new Maxtor 250GB external hard drive for my video editing work. It was formatted for FAT32 and I wanted to change it to NTFS. I also wanted to make a small partition on the drive to install a couple of my editing programs.
Instead of using Maxtor's software, I used XP's disk management utility. The instructions said to right click in an unallocated space to do the partitioning, but I could never get the "Partition" option to come up... only option about partitioning was "Delete Partition". I saw no Partitioning Wizard. So I went ahead and formatted in NTFS and thought I could partition it afterwards. But now I've found that partitioning has to come first.
My question: If I do the "Delete Partition", can I go back then and partition it into two parts and then reformat? There is nothing on the drive, so all I would lose would be time at this point. Thanks for any help.

Hi Jo:

You have to partition the drive first. My advice is to use the
Maxtor software. Since you're doing video editing, it really doesn't
matter if it's formatted to FAT-32 or NTFS. But if you wish to use
NTFS, then you can do the conversion from within XP.

If you have Partition Magic as the other reply suggested, then you can
use it from XP. PM will not be able to "see" the drive from DOS
unless you have loaded DOS drivers. So the answer is yes, you can
partition the drive into two partitions or more and then format them
as desired.

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

Yes you can. You have to delete the existing partition first. Then you can
work with the unpartitioned space. For video editing you definitely want the
NTFS file system on the partition where you will be keeping/working with
your video files. The fat32 file system limits you to a 4 gig file size.
Many video files are much greater than this. Hell, a 30 minute home video of
my Grandson is 7.6 gig, before editing.

With NTFS you can have one file up to the limit of the size of the disk
(wouldn't recommend it though) (-:

Since you are going to clean off the hard drive, there is really no reason
to get Partition Magic, although it is a great program to work with
partitions after they are formatted.

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Guest]

Thank you everyone for your help. Crusty, you came up with the answer I was looking for. I thought maybe deleting the partition was the way to go, but was reluctant to do it without a recommendation. I have another external drive to convert to NTFS as soon as I get all the data moved. Using FAT32 doesn't work well with my big video files
The reason I want to partition the 250GB drive is so that I can put my video editing and photo art programs on the smaller partition and do video editing using a laptop or a different computer (that doesn't have the programs) when I'm away from home. This will work, won't it? Jo

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

I don't see why it wouldn't work, as long as the computer you connect the
drive to has the requisite horse power!

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Ron Sommer]

Horsepower plus a Bios that will recognize the large drive and XP SP1 (or
other operating system that will
recognize the drive.)

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

OOps! Missed one rather large thing. You can not run your video editing
programs from the external hard drive, except on the machine that was used
to install the programs to the smaller external partition.

There can be hundreds of registry entries that are needed to run the
programs. These entries "will not" be in place when you move the external
drive to another computer. But hey, it can't hurt to try. You may find that
the program will install the necessary entries upon the first use on a new
machine. Stranger things have happened (-:

Suggest you install the programs as "resident" on each machine you plan to
use for editing. Keep your external drive partitioned however you see fit.

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

Thanks for catching that!

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

 

[Guest]

There is probably no reason to install my programs on the smaller partition of the large drive, if it is doubtful that the programs will run on another computer the way I was hoping. That is disappointing

From a video editing point of view, is there any advantage to having a large drive partitioned

I was reading that the defragmentation program doesn't run on drives larger than 120GB's. Is there a work around for this? Maybe I should partition it for that reason since fragmentation seems to occur very rapidly when I'm doing the video editing.

 

[Crusty \(-: Old B@stard :-\)]

I think I would break the drive into two equal partitions if it were for my
computer. What I do now is edit on one partition. When done, I store them on
another partition.

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard

There is probably no reason to install my programs on the smaller

partition of the large drive, if it is doubtful that the programs will run
on another computer the way I was hoping. That is disappointing.

From a video editing point of view, is there any advantage to having a large drive partitioned?

I was reading that the defragmentation program doesn't run on drives

larger than 120GB's. Is there a work around for this? Maybe I should
partition it for that reason since fragmentation seems to occur very rapidly
when I'm doing the video editing.

 

[Alex Nichol]

Thank you everyone for your help. Crusty, you came up with the answer I was looking for. I thought maybe deleting the partition was the way to go, but was reluctant to do it without a recommendation. I have another external drive to convert to NTFS as soon as I get all the data moved. Using FAT32 doesn't work well with my big video files.

Converting FAT32 to NTFS is liable to land you with 512 byte clusters -
not a good idea. If you can manage it, do it by deleting and making a
new one, in the way you have just checked out. If you *have* to convert
a drive that contains data, read up first at
www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm