Hello,

I purchased an external HD to backup my existing HD. I want to reformat my existing HD to get my system running like new (currently slow w/occasional problems). Anyway, I hooked up the external HD w/no problem.

Now I want to partition the new external HD. All the tutorials I find say to right-click the unallocated portion of the disk and choose "New partition". This is where I'm stuck. I've tried to right-click everything on the screen that even resembles this and I don't get a option for create a new partition. I have attached a screen shot showing what the screen looks like and what the options are that i'm getting when I right click.

Am I doing something wrong? Why cant I get the the partition wizard? What am I missing here? This should be pretty straight forward...right?

Thanks for any help out there.

H2Ofield

yeah your doing it the hard way. get out of all that go into my computer. you external hard drive should be listed there as a drive letter most likly E: right click on that and then click format and its as simple as that. Also try turning the external hard drive on you would be surprised how many people miss something as simple as that when working with new hardware.

from the screenshot i understand that your ext HD already partitioned, first you need to delete the existenting partition and then you'll get big unallocated partition, but be carefyl if you delete partition all data will be lost, if you have some staff on it you need to use 3d party partition software like disk director.

If all you want is one partition on the external HD, you dont even have to delete the partition. The disk already has one NTFS partition. From theright click menu in disk management, just select the 'format' option and follow the onscreen prompts

Thanks everyone. I figured out how to do what I needed. I used the software that came with the new HD. It did a better job of explaining how to accomplish this task. Basically, I wanted to partition the drive into two partitions, which I have now done.

Thanks again,
Barry

You may found a hard way,you could partition your hard disk through some system tools in windows.

Or,download some freeware to partition your hard disk: EASEUS partition manager or paragon.

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