

You will be able to read the drive by transferring it to another computer with an operating system installed that supports the drive’s format. If you are using the drive purely for additional data storage, you can simply install an extended partition with logical drives. if you need to install an operating system on it. We’ll start off by creating a primary partition.Ī primary partition is only necessary if you wish to make the drive bootable – ie. This can be accomplished simply by following these steps. In our example, we are going to format and partition an external hard drive in Windows OS.
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For those that want to save time and have a program do all the work securely without the risk of losing data, we recommend Acronis Disk Director.Īnd if you’re concerned about partitioning on a hard drive with a valuable data, consider True Image, a backup utility that mirrors the content on your hard drive.Īcronis Disk Director includes all of the following applications: For those that want to spend the time and get their hands dirty, you can manually partition using the steps below. Partitioning Software – The Easy Wayīefore we jump into our tutorial on how to partition your hard drive, we’d like to introduce some software that will make this job easier for you. Imagine searching for a needle in a haystack – the smaller the haystack, the quicker you’ll find it.

Why do we partition? Partitioning a drive into smaller segments increases system performance by reducing the work your computer has to do to index and find files.
