Thursday, December 6, 2012

Partition Wizard

Hey Friends,

Recently I got a good deal on an external hard drive during Thanksgiving Black Friday sale.  I got a 2TB Seagate backup plus desktop drive (external hard drive) which was on sale for $79.99 at Staples.  The drive is formatted in NTFS but it can also connect to MAC, at least that's what it says in the description of the drive.  Another purpose to buy this drive was to be used by my brother with his PS3.  Unfortunately, PS3 only recognizes FAT32 drive, so if he wants to use the new external drive, he would have to format it to FAT32.  The good news is that I found out that I don't have to format the entire drive to FAT32.  I can create partitions in the drive to have half of it served as NTFS and the other half can be FAT32.

Now, the disk management program of windows only lets you format in NTFS and not FAT32.  So I had to find another way to do that.  Thanks to one of my colleagues who introduced me to Partition Wizard software.  Partition Wizard provides with a free Home Edition version that can be downloaded from their site http://www.partitionwizard.com/.  It took just few minutes to be downloaded and installed and using it was very easy as well.

In order to keep NTFS and create FAT32, I had to first re-size the current partition to half of the original size.  Once the re-size was done, I applied the changes.  When you re-size the partition, it leaves unallocated space on the drive which can be used to create new partitions.  Next, I created a new FAT32 partition using the unallocated space of the drive.  And done!! It took less than 30 seconds to perform both the operations!!  To test the newly created partition, I copied one video over to it.  If you want to use the drive for PS3, you have to create the folders in this partition how they are created in PS3, for example, create a folder named VIDEO (that contains your movies), MUSIC (that contains your music), etc.  My brother connected the drive to his PS3 and his PS3 recognized the drive and listed the movies under the video category!!! Yay!! Partition Wizard worked like a charm and solved our PS3 problem with new drive in minutes :).

Hope this helps you!!

7 comments:

LlamajitKaur said...

Great advice - thanks! Had a friend who needed to do the same thing - use the same HD to backup files on two different file systems. Will pass your tip on to him.

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