External Hard drive cannot shrink volume to partition

fairgrace said:

Once again, thanks!

Here is the shot which I simply attached this time, but will try to use your other suggested method in the future.

I hope it's OK.

Excellent!

I didn't realize that Partition Wizard's Home Edition had now been upgraded to v6.0 as well. I just purchased the Professional Edition v6.0 because I wanted the "merge partition" feature just for possible future use, which is not part of the free Home Edition. Also, the Professional Edition supports creating a standalone boot USB flash drive, not just a standalone boot CD. I thought both of these features deserved compensation to the author of this fine product which I'd been using for free for years.

The web pages on the site appear to not all have been updated yet, and the main "Products" page still shows v5.2. Your 6.0 Home Edition screenshot thus startled me.

Nevertheless, excellent!


However... you've mistakenly created the large 389GB partition on that new drive as FAT32. That's the wrong file system to use for it. It should be NTFS.

Interestingly, you have a second 76GB partition now also on that second drive, which you created as NTFS... but as "logical", rather than as "primary" which you chose for the first 389GB partition (unfortunately selecting FAT32 instead of NTFS).

Now there's really nothing wrong with the mix of "logical" and "primary" partitions as you've got, and as long as you have a total of no more than FOUR partitions on a drive you can really use either format.

But if you do have one or more "logical" partitions then all "logical" partitions must be CONTIGUOUS, meaning they're all physically adjacent to each other (since they're really all carved out of one single large "primary" partition area referred to as the "extended partition").

And within that "extended partition", there are actually no limits to the number of "logical partitions" you can sub-define. So if you really do want more than FOUR total partitions on a drive, then you're limited to no more than THREE true independent "primary" partitions along with one "extended partition" inside of which you can then have as many "logical" partitions as you care to define.


Anyway, you really do want to delete and recreate that 389GB partition on your second drive, this time creating it as NTFS. Wouldn't be a bad idea to also FORMAT it after creating it, just to be sure.

Use Partition Wizard again, to do all this.

Hi,

Yes, you're right, but that was the old used partition and I'm concerned to convert it to NTFS in case I won't be able to use the files I've got on older versions of Windows...am I once again off the mark?

MMm, not sure I understand about the 'logical' partition I've created...just followed the Mini Tool Default option!

Cheers,
Lucia

fairgrace said:

Yes, you're right, but that was the old used partition and I'm concerned to convert it to NTFS in case I won't be able to use the files I've got on older versions of Windows...am I once again off the mark?

What "older versions of Windows" are you concerned about?

Do you have them installed in another partition of this same machine? Can you boot to either one using Boot Manager Menu?

Win98 does NOT support NTFS, but WinXP does. Which do you have? If you have WinXP as well as Win7, then there is no problem CONVERTING this partition to NTFS from FAT32. I had forgotten you had an existing partition you were trying to "shrink", and thus had existing data which would need to be preserved. Naturally, deleting and re-creating would of course lose everything on the partition so that's not the right solution.

But you can use Partition Wizard to CONVERT your FAT32 partition to NTFS, as described on their web site.

I'm not sure I understand about the 'logical' partition I've created...just followed the Mini Tool Default option!

It may have been the default, and in your case it really doesn't matter whether you created it as "logical" or "primary".

As I said earlier there's no problem having a mix of both "primary" and "logical" partitions on the same drive, as long as you don't exceed FOUR "primary" partitions on the drive. If you need four or fewer partitions, you can use either type... although "logical" partitions would be physically contiguous to each other inside of the one "extended partition". That's just where "logical" partitions go, and that's where they'd be created.

And since the "extended partition" (which supports any number of "logical" partitions sub-defined inside of it) is also a "primary" partition, that means you can have as many as THREE true "primary" partitions, and then the fourth "extended partition" (also "primary") to hold any number of "logical" partitions inside of it.

But in your case... with only two partitions total... it really doesn't matter which were selected. Both could have been "logical", or both could have been "primary", or you could do it the way you did it. No consequence, no performance impact.


Anyway, FAT32 is NOT a good file system choice for such a large partition... for several reasons. But if you're using an OS like WinXP or Win7, you should ALWAYS format drives as NTFS.

I would absolutely recommend that you use Partition Wizard to convert that partition from FAT32 to NTFS. If there is anything crucial on it, you are well advised to take a backup first or copy those files to a second location temporarily, just to feel secure... before requesting PW to convert fro FAT32 to NTFS. I have 100% confidence that it will be successful and without incident, but you don't want to be devastated if the electricity goes out while you're doing this.

Of course, if you do have crucial data anywhere... presumably you already have a reliable and dependable backup scheme (to secondary media) in place, so that you don't get devastated by some unexpected disaster on your "live" data.

Grrreat! I've got Windows XP on another computer, and if it's supported, then I'll converted to NTFS.

Thanks again.

Lucia