If you already have important data on the drive, select "Shrink Volume" instead, let Windows choose the maximum amount of shrinkage and click "Shrink." Right-click the existing partition on the external hard drive, select "Delete Volume" and choose to remove the partition. If there are other partitions, you can repeat the same steps to format the drive, drink it and apply a desired file system.Press the "Start" button, type "diskmgmt.msc" and press "Enter." When complete, a File Explorer window should appear on your screen where you can drag and drop files. This ended up taking up all night.Ĭlick Finish to begin the formatting processing. Personally, I uncheck the drive quick format option, but this can take long. Next we will label the drive, for my purposes, this will be called BACKUP. For this initial partition we are going to use NTFS. For large drives such as this, other NTFS, Windows also supports exFAT which provide greater compatibility with other platforms such as macOS and Linux. This part of the wizard lets us choose the File system we wanna format the drive in. We will now assign the drive a letter then click Next. In this particular scenario, I will split the drive into two, creating a 2 TB partition for backing up my Windows computers. For instance, I could use one part of the drive just for System Image and File History backups and another for dragging and dropping files to use with another file system such as Macintosh. Here we can use the opportunity to split the drive into smaller portions. This will start the New Simple Volume wizard, which will let us format the drive as a NTFS drive, which is the file system for Windows.
Right click it then click New Simple Volume Start by right clicking on each of the hidden unallocated partitions then click Delete until its a single block of unallocated partition space. But sometimes this does not work and you might need to apply extra steps partition and configure the drive. If your external drive appears as a simple unallocated drive, you can simply right click it then click Format. Here you will see not only your new external drive and all its hidden partitions, but those locally created for Windows such as the recovery partitions. Press Windows key + X on your keyboard then click Disk Management To solve that, we will need to visit the built in Disk Management utility in Windows which provides advanced formatting and partitioning tools to get your drive fully operational. For instance, my external drive was factory formatted as FAT 32 which maxes out at 32 GBs. When you first connect a new external drive, you might be surprised to know its not fully ready to be used with Windows 10. This article shows you how you can setup a new external drive, partition and get it ready for use with not just Windows, but other operating systems too.
For years, Windows has included some form of a backup solution, whether it was early utilities such as NT Backup or File History and System Image. As much as we benefit from always on availability of on Cloud storage providers such as OneDrive, some data due to size constraints or personal security or even convenience due to limited bandwidth are best served by backing up to an external drive. They just keep getting bigger and bigger and with good reason. This would probably be my 8th or 9th drive I have bought since I started using them back in the mid 2000's. Recently, I picked up a new external drive with 4TBs of storage for under 100 dollars.