class="align-right" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/DUicon.png"/>I recently picked up an external hard drive for my href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/mac">Mac (one terabyte of memory to be exact), but I really needed to use it for both my Mac and my href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/windows">Windows laptop. However, as you may know, Mac formatting and href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tags/pc">PC formatting for external hard drives are totally different.

Granted, it’s possible you may already know how to partition an href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/buying-hard-drive/">external hard drive DIY-style. Furthermore, your hard drive may already come with onboard software that does it for you (but honestly, I really don’t like using those included apps at all). However, let’s take a look at how to do so.

Open The Disk Utility Application

In order to prep things for your partition, it would be best to use an external hard drive that you absolutely do not have any important files on whatsoever. If you already have thrown some stuff in there (like I did when I was first trying this out), go ahead and copy them over to your computer. With that being said, make sure that the external hard drive is at least plugged in for this to work (the reason I say this is the same reason that costume companies write “cape does not enable wearer to fly” on their superhero outfits).

In case you have never used this app before, just go into your Mac’s Applications, click on the Utilities folder, and find the Disk Utility application. (For those of you still searching, it looks like a hard drive with a stethoscope on it.) Open it up, and you’ll be treated to a brand-spankin’ new window on your screen.

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On the left-side of this window, you will see the different hard drives connected to your computer. You will see your main hard drive (or hard drives) located within the computer on this section of the window, but you should also be able to find your external hard drive somewhere in the midst of it all.

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After you do this, be sure to open the contextual menu of this hard drive (two-finger click on trackpad or CTRL + click) and select the Unmount option of the drive. This is very important in order for this project to work for you.

Set Up The Partition

As you might be able to tell by the screenshots, I have already partitioned my external hard drive (JxHart Mac and JxHart PC). However, you can still follow along by looking at the rest of the Disk Utility window.

When you first look at this window, you will see a few tabs that give you a variety of options for your external hard drive. One of them will simply say Partition, and as you might be able to guess, this is the one that you want to select. After doing so, you will arrive on a menu that provides you with what you need to partition the hard drive. The item on this page that you should look for will be a drop-down menu labeled Volume Scheme.

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Since we are partitioning the external hard drive for just both Mac and PC, you should set the Volume Scheme up for two partitions. Once you do this, you will be given two easy-to-use graphic images of simple boxes that represent the two partitions. What you can now do with these is set up how much memory you want for each partition.

Work Out The Sizes And Formats

On my external hard drive, I gave the Mac portion 950 gigs of space and the PC portion 50 gigabytes of space simply because I use the Mac side a little bit more. With that in mind, I am still able to open up the PC portion of the hard drive on my Mac and take files from it. However, I cannot add or delete files. That’s why it’s good to have the partition.

After you have decided on the sizes of each partition, you should then go back and change the names for each one. I would suggest that they reflect what you will be using each partition for, such as “Mac HD” and “PC HD”. Realistically, you could change the names of the partitions before sizing them, but this is really up to you.

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Finally, you absolutely need to change the writing format of your external hard drive for each partition so this does exactly what you are wanting this to. To do so, select the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) option for the Mac side of your external hard drive and the href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/format-large-hard-drive-fat-fat32/">ExFAT option for the PC side of your external hard drive.

When you are ready for the partitioning to begin, simply click  Apply and you are good to go. It’s really simple to do, and you should be able to complete the project within minutes.

Conclusion

Most likely you can  (definitely) follow a similar process with other operating systems such as href="http://www.makeuseof.com/service/linux/">Linux or even some hipster OS that we’ve never even heard about. Furthermore, you could make two or more Mac-related partitons as a way to just keep yourself organized. I’ll also assume that you could use one of those partitions for href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/online-resources-learn-apples-time-machine/">Time Machine if you are using something a little more permanent.

Which other apps or programs do you use to partition hard drives or external hard drives? Do you have any other tips to add on to what I have written here?

View full post on MakeUseOf

As Partition Magic alternative, EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition is a FREE ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management utility. It allows you to extend partition (especially for system drive), manage disk space easily, settle low disk space problem on MBR and GUID partition table (GPT) disk.

View full post on FileHippo.com

As Partition Magic alternative, EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition is a FREE ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management utility. It allows you to extend partition (especially for system drive), manage disk space easily, settle low disk space problem on MBR and GUID partition table (GPT) disk.

View full post on FileHippo.com

As Partition Magic alternative, EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition is a FREE ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management utility. It allows you to extend partition (especially for system drive), manage disk space easily, settle low disk space problem on MBR and GUID partition table (GPT) disk.

View full post on FileHippo.com

As Partition Magic alternative, EASEUS Partition Master Home Edition is a FREE ALL-IN-ONE partition solution and disk management utility. It allows you to extend partition (especially for system drive), manage disk space easily, settle low disk space problem on MBR and GUID partition table (GPT) disk.

View full post on FileHippo.com

style="border: 0px none;margin-left:20px;float:right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/shutterstock_68940292.jpeg" />TrueCrypt is an open source encryption tool that does a fantastic job at encrypting your files. We’ve covered it many times before with easy tutorials on href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/encrypt-your-usb-stick-with-truecrypt-60/">encrypting your USB drive, and href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/encrypted-folders-truecrypt-7/">encrypting a folder – but today I’d like to show you how to create a truly hidden encrypted drive, that could remain hidden even if you were forced to reveal the password.

How? read on.

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Hidden Volume:

A “hidden” encrypted volume provides you with “plausible deniability” should the need ever arise. For example, if your drives were seized, and you were forced under order of court to reveal the password – then your hidden drive would provide an extra layer of security. How? We will first create an outer volume that is encrypted, and hide some fake files on there. Then within that encrypted outer volume, we will create a further encrypted volume. You end up with two password-protected volumes – and you can safely reveal the outer volume password – without revealing a secondary hidden volume. The TrueCrypt page has a more technical explanation of a href="http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/?s=hidden-volume">Hidden Volume that you might want to read.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/hidden-volume.gif" />

You will need

Since we’ve covered basic Truecrypt file and folder encryptions before, today I will be using an entire partition. This could be a USB hard drive or a href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/install-hard-drive/">second hard drive in your PC. This drive will be formatted entirely in the process, so make sure there is nothing important on it.

You will also need a copy of the latest TrueCrypt for your system, which you can href="http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads">download here. For this guide, I have used the Mac OSX version, but the interface is similar on Windows or Linux.

Create a Partition

Begin by plugging in your drive and creating a partition that we will encrypt. I showed you href="http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/setup-hard-drive-windows/">how to create a partition on Windows last week, but on my OS X installation I simply opened Disk Utility, find the drive in the left side, and click on the Partition tab on the right. I chose 1 partition, gave it a name, and clicked Apply.

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Create Encrypted Volume

Launch TrueCrypt and click on Create Volume. Choose the second option, which says “Create a volume within a partition / drive“.

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Next, choose to create a Hidden TrueCrypt Volume.

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Be careful when you select the device on the next screen. If you gave your partition a helpful name, you should have no problem. Go ahead and select the device.

Next are the encryption options. The defaults are those deemed secure enough for top secret government documents, so it’s probably good enough for us.

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Next, you will need to choose a password for your outer volume. Remember, this will be a password you rarely ever use, but will be the one you give up if forced to. It is very important that this password be substantially different to the one you will encrypt your hidden drive with.

The next screen is a little difficult to explain, but suffice to say the more you move your mouse around, the more secure your drive will be. Just do it for about 30 seconds or so, then click Format.

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For my 160 GB USB drive, it took about an hour and half just to encrypt the outer volume. This is a one-off thing though, when you actually use the drive you need only enter the password.

Next, you need to copy some fake files to the encrypted disk. These can be anything, but ideally they should be private looking files, maybe some home movies – something you wouldn’t mind someone seeing if you were forced to reveal passwords. Warning: You shouldn’t write to this outer volume later, or your actual hidden volume may become corrupted. It is a fake storage container only to act as a diversion. Click on the button labelled Open Outer Volume, and start copying files in. Bear in mind that if you have a 1 TB drive and someone investigating finds only 100 MB of “secret” files, it may look a bit suspicious.

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When you’re done copying, go back and click next. TrueCrypt will automatically unmount the drive and figure out how much space you have left for your real hidden volume. You can make it as large as you like, but I like to leave a little room on the outer drive in case someone were to accidentally write to it.

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Make the outer volume in the same way, but this time make your password long, and really good. Include capital letters, lowercase letters, numbers and punctuation. A good tactic if you don’t like random passwords is to create a sentence around it like: 20MILLIONsecretF1l3$. When asked if you’ll be storing large files, I suggest you choose ‘yes’ as the world of computing moves rapidly, and even today some movies are over 4 GB in size. Best to future-proof the drive now.

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Wait again while the outer volume is encrypted. You can now mount your secure hidden volume via TrueCrypt, as it won’t be mounted by default once the hidden volume is created. Just click Mount All Devices, and type in the correct password. You don’t need to type both your outer volume password and your hidden one – just the hidden one is fine.

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If you leave your computer on a lot of the time, don’t forget to unmount the drive. After a restart or shutdown the computer, the volume will be automatically dismounted.

Conclusion

If you read through this far, then obviously you have something worth hiding, and by utilising a hidden encrypted volume, you give yourself a way out should things go awry. Why bother encrypting a drive if the big-brother police state you are living in has the power to legally demand the decryption keys, or send you to jail? Don’t be a sucker, just give them the wrong keys!

Download href="http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads">TrueCrypt and try it out.

Image credit: rel="nofollow" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic.mhtml?id=68940292">ShutterStock />
/>Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on href="http://www.makeuseof.com/answers/">MakeUseOf Answers! />
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style="border: 0px none;margin-left:20px;float:right;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/giveawayparagonhdmanager.png" />With its easy to follow step by step wizards, Paragon Hard Disk Manager makes it a cinch to address all of your hard drive maintenance needs – from partitioning, to back up and restore, migration, system recovery and much more. Paragon is the ideal option for advanced users, and with its easy to follow instructions and wizards, will not overwhelm the novice user.

That’s why we’re offering 50 licenses for Paragon Software’s top-rated href="http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-personal/">Hard Disk Manager 2010 Suite worth over $2000 in total! Find out how you can win a copy for yourself.

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Partitioning

Partitioning your hard drive can be an intimidating experience if you don’t know what you’re doing. Paragon takes all the difficulty out of the process, allowing you to create partitions, which is particularly useful if you want to run several operating systems on your computer. Paragon also allows you to easily format, delete, resize and merge partitions.

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Backup & Recovery

Backing up all of the data on your hard disk couldn’t be easier using Paragon Hard Disk Manager. Select which partitions of your hard drive you want to backup to three possible locations. Your data can be stored on a local or network drive, can be saved to an FTP location, or you can burn it to a CD or DVD. Restoring data that has been backed up using Paragon is a piece of cake. Simply navigate to the backup that you had created using the software, and follow the steps in the wizard to restore your data.

style="text-align: center;"> class="aligncenter" style="border: 0pt none;" src="http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/backup.png" />

Copying and Migration

Paragon’s migration feature makes it easy to migrate an entire drive or partition to a new one. Copying a partition is as simple as selecting the partition you want to clone, and selecting the target location for the clone to be stored. The same is true for the hard disk migration feature, allowing you to migrate your entire hard disk to a new location, which makes upgrading to a new machine as easy as can be, restoring your entire system setup.

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Security and Optimization

Fine tuning your computer with Paragon’s optimization features will keep your machine feeling brand new. Additionally, if you have confidential documents on your computer, use Paragon’s secure method of wiping entire partitions or disks to ensure that your personal information can never be retrieved.

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Boot Management

If one OS simply isn’t enough for you, Paragon makes it easy to both manage several operating systems on one computer and allows you to prepare your computer for a new OS install.

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How do I win a copy?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions.

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colspan="2" align="left"> style="text-decoration: underline;">STEP 1 colspan="4" valign="top">Join our Facebook page by clicking the Like button or you can follow us on Twitter, if you prefer. If you’re already following us, you may skip this step. width="280" align="middle" valign="top"> src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=27517455413&width=250&connections=0&stream=false&header=false" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:250px; height:70px"> />If you can’t see the fanbox, click on href="http://facebook.com/makeuseof/" target="_blank">this link. width="160" align="middle" valign="center"> src="http://api.tweetmeme.com/v2/follow.js?screen_name=makeuseof&style=normal" frameborder="0" height="70" width="160"> />
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Spread the word to your friends and have fun!

MakeUseOf would like to thank href="http://paragon-software.com/">the Paragon Software team for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via href="mailto:jackson@makeuseof.com?subject=Giveaways&cc=aibek@makeuseof.com">email. />
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Hard drives are huge nowadays, not just in popularity, but also in data storage size.  Now that you can easily pick up a terabyte hard drive for a reasonable price, you have a new problem: how do you split up that space? Partitioning is a method of dividing storage space inside a hard drive and lets you avoid having one big disk in My Computer.

I like to keep my operating system in its own partition, separate from my personal data like My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, and My Videos. This means that if I ever have a problem with my OS (or want to wipe it, install a different version, or a different OS altogether), I can easily interact with that specific partition and my personal data will be left alone. Partitions are also great for installing multiple operating systems on a disk – I currently have an NTFS partition for Windows 7, an NTFS partition for Windows XP, as well as ext4 and swap partitions for Linux.

Now that you know how useful partitioning your disk can be, you need some good software to do it. In this giveaway, we’re offering 50 copies of Paragon Partition Manager 11 Personal Edition to MakeUseOf readers!

Paragon Partition Manager 11 Personal Edition is great for advanced users and basic users alike. Sporting two interfaces, you can enable as much control as you need when partitioning your hard drive. Power users can reveal advanced controls with the click of a button.

With Partition Manager 11 Personal Edition, you can easily create, delete, resize, and merge partitions. If you have a new hard drive, you can use Create Partition to divvy up your space and select different file systems. If you’re working with an existing hard drive, you can use Delete Partition or Merge Partitions to remove unnecessary partitions and make room for new ones. Finally, you can use Resize Partitions to resize your current partitions to free up more space for data or other operating systems.

You will also have access to sophisticated features like migrating your current hard drive to an entirely different disk (of the same or different size), and also making an identical copy of a current partition.

Before working with partitions, you should always note that any activity that messes with the structure of your hard drive can result in loss of data. This is one of the worrisome parts of disk partitioning, but Paragon Partition Manager 11 Personal Edition mitigates this risk by providing backup functionality to provide a data loss free operation. This feature is worth its weight in gold – you can make changes to your disk without having to worry so much about your data surviving the transition.

You’ll even be reminded to create a recovery CD before you start making changes to your partitions, which I strongly recommend you do.

If you really like tinkering with your system, this software includes a few extra features that I’ve found to be very useful. The Boot Management feature allows you to customize the boot parameters of your system (stuff that anybody who is familiar with the Linux application Gparted would recognize) and also helps you prep your disk for the installation of a new operating system.

Finally, Partition Manager 11 Personal Edition includes a great partition manager with full access to all of the features I previously described – except this time you can easily view partitions across all your disks.  Since I’ve always used Gparted for disk partitioning, I felt very comfortable working in the Partition Manager mode.

How do I win a copy?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions.

This giveaway begins now and ends Friday, 6th August at 2100hrs PST. The winners will be selected at random and announced via email.

Spread the word to your friends and have fun!

MakeUseOf would like to thank the Paragon Software team for their generosity while participating in this giveaway. Interesting in sponsoring? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via email.

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Hello there, I have an IBM Thinkpad T30 which is installed withWindows Vista operating system. The laptop is giving some problems while working and hence I want to install Windows Xp on the thinkpad. Therefore I want How to partition Thinkpad T30 and install Windows XP Pro on it. Any suggestions/solutions are more than welcome. 

As you want to install the Windows Xp on the laptop, insert theinstallation disk of Windows operating system and boot the system from the installation disk. Select install a fresh copy of Windows installation option and let the procedure complete. Before starting the installation process, take back up of the necessary data as you have to format the drive. 

Hey thanks for replying to the post. As suggested I inserted the Windows installation disk on the computer and tried to boot the system from the installation disk but the system did not boot from the disk. Instead it gave a disk boot failure error message. Why am I getting this error? Is there any other procedure to install Windows XP on Windows Vista laptop? Please help. 

The boot disk failure message indicates that the installation disk which you are using is faulty due to which the system is not booting from the installation disk. Try using some other installation disk to install the operating system and see if the same error is encountered. Changing the installation disk will solve the problem hopefully. 

Have you disabled the Native sata support of the hard drive? If not then it could be the reason why you are not able to boot the system from the installation disk. Inorder to boot the system from the installation disk, you will have to disable the Native Sata support or the hard drive. While booting the system, press the F10 button to go BIOS setup and go to Advanced Peripherals section. Disable the Native Sata support and save the settings. Reboot the system and boot the system from the installation disk. 

Yes the problem was solved after disabling the native sata support of the HDD from the BIOS. After disabling the native sata support, I was able to install Windows XP operating system on the computer without any problems. The information provided was really very helpful. Thanks in advance.

I wanted to add more space to my Windows boot camp partition because I wanted to put a couple games on it. There are other ways to do this, but this is the option that I felt most comfortable with. I like this because you also have a backup of your windows boot camp partition, just in case anything goes wrong (like a virus..lol) Twitter.com/TheSavage042

This tutorial shows you how to partition your hard drive. A partitioned hard drive can be used to back up important files, set up a multiple boot option and for various other reasons. Please rate and comment this video. If you like this video then subscribe! ~Wartex8 **You can’t partition a hard drive while you are using it** HTML embed code can be found at revver.com

In this easy-to-follow video, I show you how to partition, and un-partition a hard disk drive, using Windows 7. This process also works with Windows Vista as well, but does not work with Windows XP and below. Website: www.vincebognot.com Twitter: www.twitter.com Contact: vince@vincebognot.com Save 25% Off Your New Domain Name With Hover: www.hover.com

This video is dedicated to my uncle who has helped me soooo much with computers :- ) This is a video on how to fix the HFS+ partition error that comes up when you install kalyway 10.5.2 Links: Kalyway 10.5.2: thepiratebay.org Kalyway Combo update: thepiratebay.org Windows Vista…

PLZ!!!!!!!!!!!! Subscribe. Hope you enjoyed this video on how to Partition and Unpartition your hard drive. Contact E-Mail: mastermi6productions@live.com or message me on youtube or comment below Hope to hear from you. MMP

In this CitronTech video, I will be demonstrating how to create a new partition in Windows 7. This can be done by shrinking a existing partition and creating a new partition out of that shrunk space. Tutorial on how to DELETE/COMBINE a partition in Windows 7/Vista: www.youtube.com What you need: – A partition/hdd that you will be dividing. – A cup of coffee (=D) If you are having any troubles doing this, send me a YouTube message or post a comment and I will help your solve your issues (If they’re possible to solve). Thanks for watching this CitronTech video! Please subscribe, rate and comment.

My Website themicrohelper.webs.com ________________________________________ In this video I will show you how to Delete your Partition if you Made one and you made a mistake of making the Memory size for it to big. So it’s not that hard at all. Just follow the video =)