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General discussion

Partitioning an external hard drive with data

Feb 8, 2007 11:39PM PST

Is there a way to partition an external hard drive and maintain the integrity of the existing data.

Discussion is locked

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With 99% chance? Yes.
Feb 8, 2007 11:56PM PST

Partition Magic does that but once in awhile someone will lose it all. I guess it comes down to if you feel you'll be lucky.

-> Not to pry, but why do this? I can organize my stuff by creating a new subdirectory. Safer than playing with partitions.

Bob

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why partition?
Feb 9, 2007 12:05AM PST

I need to re-fromat the drive to NTFS because of the file size limitations of FAT

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Conversion to NTFS is natively supported.
Feb 9, 2007 12:12AM PST

And creation as well. I think the full story is missing here so I can't give a good answer but if NTFS is needed we could just do that.

Bob

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More details
Feb 9, 2007 12:16AM PST

I am trying to save a disk image before re-installing the operating system on my laptop. This is why the file would not fit on the FAT system because it will be approximately 60GB in size.

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Then it's the old 4GB file size limit. Which we can fix in
Feb 9, 2007 12:22AM PST
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Perfect
Feb 9, 2007 12:30AM PST

Thanks Bob. The article does give me a better sense as to the rsiks.