Need help formatting and partitioning 2.5" portable HDD

hi guys,

i'm a novice w/ external HDDs... need your help...

i recently bought a 320GB HDD and an external HDD enclosure. how do i format and create partitions?

thanks in advance!

 

It's easy and it's the same whether your OS is WinXP or Vista. For this you need to use the 'Disk Management' utility.

Formating and Partitioning in XP and Vista:
http://www.ehow.com/how_6026_format-hard-drive.html

Changing the size of an existing partition in Vista:
http://techrepublic.com.com/2346-10877_11-65237.html

 

Once you are in Disk Management utility...

Look for a drive that is labeled in "black", it would list that as an "unallocated disk", simply right click on that drive and create "New Partition(or something along those lines)" here you can asign different sizes to your needs. Once that's done, you can then format your partition, and make sure you mount the drive by assigning a drive letter.

 

i think vista's Disk Management can do more compared to XP. access it from computer management from administrative tools

 

if you're looking for a something bootable, gparted is excellent

 

thanks for the help. however, the only option i had from disk management is simple volume. i have already formatted the drive but how do i create partitions?

and btw, i bought a 320GB HDD but in disk management the volume showing is only 298GB. is this normal?

 

It's down to hard drive manufacturers lying about disk sizes - they class 1GB as 1 billion bytes as opposed to 1024*1024*1024 bytes (1,073,741,824)

Gigabyte (GB) = 1,024 Megabytes or 1,073,741,824 Bytes

320,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 = ~298.09