Partitioning question

[Jon]

I am running XP HE SP2.

I recently purchased an external Seagate 400GB USB drive, which was
immediately 'found' and recognised by XP. As the drive came pre-formatted as
FAT32, using 'Disk Management', I formatted the drive into NTFS. I was
hoping to split the drive into partitions, but I can't find a way to do this
within 'Disk Management' now... can anyone tell me how I do this, please?

Thanks.

 

[Rich Barry]

Jon, I just found out about this simple and free partition manager. I
loaded on to a floppy but you can also load it on to a
CD as an iso image. Works great.
http://www.cutepm.com/

 

[Jon]

Thanks for that, Rich. I'd still like to know why the option to partition
does appear when I right click the 'grid' of the drive, and therefore the
partition wizard is inaccessible. Should I delete the one primary partition
and start over?

With thanks.

 

[Rich Barry]

Jon, when you formatted the drive NTFS the drive had only one partition.
You cannot split up that one partition into smaller
ones unless you use a third party Software such as Acronis Disk Manager or
Symantec Partition Magic. Disk Management
in WinXP will only create a new partition from unused space on your hard
drive. So, yes do delete the one NTFS partition
you created and then create the desired number of smaller partitions.
After they are created you can format in NTFS or
FAT32.

 

[Jon]

Many thanks, Rich, I'll do that.

Regards,
Jon

Jon, when you formatted the drive NTFS the drive had only one partition.
You cannot split up that one partition into smaller
ones unless you use a third party Software such as Acronis Disk Manager or
Symantec Partition Magic. Disk Management
in WinXP will only create a new partition from unused space on your hard
drive. So, yes do delete the one NTFS partition
you created and then create the desired number of smaller partitions.
After they are created you can format in NTFS or
FAT32.

 

[Noncompliant]

Maybe I missed something. Every partition manager, msdos, and XP included,
when creating a partition, the partition created determines the available
filesystem type. Whether formatted afterwards or not.

 

[Rich Barry]

No, a partition is just a slice of the hard drive. You have to format it
in whatever filesystem you want to use. NTFS, FAT
FAT16, FAT32 and EXT3 or REISERFS for Linux.

 

[Noncompliant]

The partition has to be formatted in order to use filesystem within it.

The filesystem TYPE is determined when making the partition, not when
formatting it.

Invisible in disk management as it does both partitioning and formatting in
sequence.