can you partition an ntfs hard drive?

[kennl66]

HI. I have an 80GB hard drive using the ntfs in Windows XP Pro. When I try to partition it w/ patition magic 8 it said that It needs a FAT32. Is there a way to partion it w/ Windows XP's disk management? thanks.

 

[boshuter]

You should be able to do it with Partician Magic 8. I dont' think you can do it with disk management if the drive is allready partitioned as one large particion. You can do it when you install xp. BTW, are you using FAT 32 or NTFS? I don't understand why Partition Magic won't work, that's what I use and I have both FAT32 and NTFS partitions on the same drive (dual boot XP and 98). Maybe you can give a few more details of the exact problem.

 

[Nothinman]

Hard drives are neither NTFS or FAT, they're just platters of bits. You have to create atleast 1 partition, atleast with Windows, and format that with a filesystem, in your case NTFS was used. You can create up to 4 primary partitions on an x86 PC, if you only have 1 right now you should have no problems resizing the current NTFS filesystem to make it smaller and then adding a new partition to put another filesystem on.

 

[Sianath]

If it's one partition, you will have to use a 3rd party utility to shrink your existing partition. Windows doesn't support resizing the system partition (or shrinking any partition, system or not).

 

[islandtechengineers]

if you have an 80 gig drive with xp installed on it with an 80 gig ntfs partition you'll have to shrink that ntfs partiton to gane free space to create other partitons in which you can assign another file system such as fat 32.

"When I try to partition it w/ patition magic 8 it said that It needs a FAT32." what were you attempting when you got that message? If you own a copy of partition magic 8, you own a 3rd party utility. if you use the boot disk feature it will create a portable version of the partiton tool which could come in handy if you durn it to a bootable cd.