I'm trying to shrink a USB external drive using the vista disk manager or whatever the default is. I want to shrink the current ntfs partition then add a FAT 32 partition. The shrinking is taking forever though, and I think it may not be working. Is it okay to just exit it, or force quit?
stop a hard drive mid partition?
- Thread starter oregon
- Start date
Gee? I could think of someone else that wouldn't want to hear that the shrink option in the Vista DM is sssslowwwww....!
Shrinking down a partition on any drive even with a 3rd party drive tool does take time! You are compressing data to some extent to begin with. The "fast way" which you may not want to do is simply remove it and create totally new one smaller in size in far less time even seeing it formatted!
Working with dual and multiple boot of two versions of Windows and even Linux one free drive tool provided by the open source people has proven itself well over and over for resizing as well as creation and deletion of partitions. But even when going to use GParted rather then the Disk Management tool found in Vista to shrink a partition down time will tend to ...dddddddrag along rather slowly.
Shrinking down a partition on any drive even with a 3rd party drive tool does take time! You are compressing data to some extent to begin with. The "fast way" which you may not want to do is simply remove it and create totally new one smaller in size in far less time even seeing it formatted!
Working with dual and multiple boot of two versions of Windows and even Linux one free drive tool provided by the open source people has proven itself well over and over for resizing as well as creation and deletion of partitions. But even when going to use GParted rather then the Disk Management tool found in Vista to shrink a partition down time will tend to ...dddddddrag along rather slowly.
One other thing to add here would be downloading a copy of the software for the drive if you haven't already done that. You should keep a backup copy of the software whenever you have any Fat volume on a drive so Vista can see onto it. With NTFS Windows will simply add a logical drive letter on it's own.
Once you see the shrinking in progess you always risk a chance that something will go wrong since the volume is being compressed somewhat already. For stopping it suddenly that would be another risk as well.
When planning something like you have to expect it will take some time and not be in too much of a rush to see it done. As the expression goes: "haste makes waste"!
The first thing before attempting this for you would be backing anything up you can't replace if you have anything important on the drive now before proceeding like Cromewell pointed out already. If the drive was just bought new and rather empty all you would need to do there is make a quick temp folder on the internal drive to hold those files until you have the external model setup the way you want it with the two partitions.
When planning something like you have to expect it will take some time and not be in too much of a rush to see it done. As the expression goes: "haste makes waste"!
The first thing before attempting this for you would be backing anything up you can't replace if you have anything important on the drive now before proceeding like Cromewell pointed out already. If the drive was just bought new and rather empty all you would need to do there is make a quick temp folder on the internal drive to hold those files until you have the external model setup the way you want it with the two partitions.