harddrive partition paranoia

May 7, 2006 7:39 PM

Can you reformat part of a partitioned hard drive without erasing the contents of the other partitions?

I have a 250GB Lacie external drive, part of which is FAT32 (empty), and the other part is NTFS and full. I want to convert the whole drive to NTFS, but I'm very worried that I might just wipe everything out. I'm planning to use the windows XP to do the job.

posted by mert to Computers & Internet (12 answers total)

Best answer: You can't combine both into a single partition without a program like Partition Magick. You can, however, reformat the empty partition as NTFS and still have two partitions, without any problems.
posted by knave at 7:41 PM on May 7, 2006

Response by poster: God bless you and god bless ask metafilter.
posted by mert at 7:45 PM on May 7, 2006

Beware of PartitionMagic, there's a reason why it's earned the nickname PartitionTragic. There are some bugs that can cause data loss that haven't been fixed in years.

I heard Acronis Disk Director Suite is way better, although I didn't actually try it out yet.
posted by Sharcho at 8:58 PM on May 7, 2006

You could go all NTFS-wacky. Do Knave's suggestion, but then combine the two NTFS volumes into a spanned dynamic volume. This is verboten for XP Home, but 2k advanced server, XP Pro, and 2k3 server can do it. (compmgmt.msc --> disk management)
posted by Myself at 9:12 PM on May 7, 2006

Oh wait! Dynamic volumes aren't supported on removable disks, which USB and Firewire both are. Foiled again!

Anyway, keeping the partitions separate is definitely safer than trying to expand the one with data in it. The sneaky bastard plan would be to buy another identical drive, shuffle your data around, then wipe and return the (old, for extra bastardness) drive.

You probably know someone with enough storage sitting around to hold a backup copy of your data for a few hours while you're messing with this. Having made a backup ensures that PartitionMagic will work flawlessly.
posted by Myself at 9:16 PM on May 7, 2006

You can resize your NTFS partition to be much bigger as well, using Linux and NTFS Resize. At your own risk, of course.
posted by adzm at 9:49 PM on May 7, 2006

If you're brave: delete FAT32, resize NTFS. If not, backup and reformat. And yes, Acronis Disk Director does have far fewer kinks than Partition Magic these days.
posted by holgate at 10:24 PM on May 7, 2006

You should NEVER try anything major like this without backup your data first.

Then, once you've backed up your data, why bother with Partition Magick or anything else? Just wipe, reformat, restore.
posted by randomstriker at 1:13 AM on May 8, 2006

SystemRescueCd (free, linux-based bootcd) should allow you to delete the FAT32 partition, and resize the NTFS partition to occupy the entire disk. You might need to remove the drive from its enclosure and hang it off an (internal) IDE cable, I've had mixed results with it (linux) autodetecting external drives properly.

In case you don't feel like backing up several hundred GB's onto DVDR's - you should at least spend a few minutes to backup the partion table (MBT) - the most common negative result of these sort of operations isn't data being destroyed, but rather the partions which hold that data magically disappearing - something that restoring the partition table ought to fix, quickly.
posted by unmake at 1:55 AM on May 8, 2006

The Open Source tools, as in what you find on SystemRescueCD have a significant limitation. I endorse them and use them often myself, but I must warn that none of the open source tools available allow you to move the start of an NTFS partition. You can grow and shrink it using ntfsresize, but the only way to move the start is to use partimage or something like it to duplicate the partition, then delete the old partition and resize the new partition to take up the rest of the space.

Partition magic has a special talent for mangling data. Acronis is a little better, but I would make sure that all of your important data is backed up before messing around with the partitions at all. If the power is interrupted or the system hiccups in the middle of the operation, you can lose everything quite easily. There is a company called "7tools" that sells inexpensive home-user grade tools for partition mangling, if you want to go that way. Otherwise, I recommend downloading Knoppix and reading up about the tools "qtparted", "partimage", and "gpart". I specifically recommend against using the built in Windows tools for partitioning, as they are lacking in both features and robustness.

I will say again for emphasis that any time you manipulate the partitions, you are at risk of losing all your data. If there is anything on that disk that you can't bear the thought of losing, you should back it up. In fact, you should back it up anyway because hard drives fail, generally when it is least convenient.
posted by leapfrog at 8:12 AM on May 8, 2006

I hope it's clear that you cannot low level format only part of a drive. Low level format is all or nothing.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 10:10 AM on May 8, 2006

you can just convert FAT32 to NTFS from a prompt with no formatting required. link. I think it only works one way.
posted by psychobum at 2:56 AM on May 9, 2006