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Do you want to partition your USB drive using the built-in Disk Management tool in Windows 10? Want to create multiple partitions on a USB drive? Here is how to partition a USB drive in Creators Update and above versions of Windows 10.
Disk Management is a built-in drive management tool in Windows. You can use it to partition a hard drive, format a hard drive, or change a hard drive letter. To open Disk Management, you can use one of the two ways below. Video Tutorial of Free Disk Management for Windows 10/8/7. Disk Management is a convenient tool in Windows system, which enables to free manage disk space. As the new released Windows operating system, Windows 10 Disk Management has some improvements compared to the previous Windows.
In Windows 10 Anniversary Update and earlier versions of Windows 10, Windows would not allow users to partition USB drives from Disk Management. While it has always been possible to create multiple partitions on internal drives via Disk Management, partitioning USB drive was not possible.
We had to either use the Command Prompt or third-party software to create additional partitions on a USB drive.
With Windows 10 Creators Update (v1703), Windows 10 allows users to partition USB drives. The only condition is that the USB drive must be formatted in NTFS to partition it.
In this guide, we will see how to partition your USB drive in Windows 10 from Disk Management without using the Command Prompt or third-party software.
To partition your USB drive on Windows 10
IMPORTANT: Back up all data from the USB drive to another location before proceeding further to avoid data loss.
Step 1: First of all, connect your USB drive to a PC running Windows 10 Creators Update (v1703) or above version of Windows 10. Back up all data to another drive.
Step 2: Open up This PC. Right-click on the USB drive which you want to partition and then click Properties. Check if the USB drive is formatted in NTFS. If yes, you should see NTFS next to File system as shown in the picture below.
If the USB drive is formatted in FAT or FAT 32, right-click on the USB drive again (in This PC), click Format. Choose NTFS from File System drop-down box and then click Start button. Click OK button when you see the warning dialog to format the USB drive in NTFS. Once done, you will see “Format complete” message.
Step 3:Right-click on the Start button on the taskbar. Click Disk Management to open the same.
Step 4: In the Disk Management window, right-click on the USB drive and then click Shrink Volume option. This action will open Shrink dialog. If the USB flash drive is formatted in FAT, the Shrink Volume option doesn’t appear.
Step 5: In the “Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB” field, type in the amount in MB that you want to use for creating a new partition on the USB drive. For instance, on a 16 GB drive, if you want to create two partitions of about 8 GB, then shrink the drive by about 7000 MB.
Click Shrink button. The action will create unallocated space on your USB drive.
Step 6: Now, right-click on the newly created unallocated space on USB, and then click New Simple Volume option. Make sure that you are right-clicking on the unallocated space of USB drive only.
Step 7: Once New Simple Volume Wizard appears on screen, click Next button.
Step 8: In this step, you need to specify the size for the new volume or partition. If you want to use all unallocated space to create a partition (two partitions on USB drive), go ahead and click Next button. But if you want to create two or more partitions from the available unallocated space, reduce the Simple volume size.
Click Next button.
Step 9: Choose a drive letter for the new partition on the USB. Click Next button.
Step 10: Finally, click Next button to create a new partition on the USB drive. Click Finish button to close the wizard.
You should now see two partitions on USB drive in File Explorer as well as in Disk Management.
To delete partitions
IMPORTANT: This will erase all data on the USB drive. Please back up your data to another drive before deleting partitions.
Step 1: Open up Disk Management.
Step 2:Right-click on one of the partitions on the USB drive, and click Delete Volume to create unallocated space. Do this step for all partitions on the USB drive. Please make sure that the partition or volume you are deleting is on the USB drive, and there is no data on the USB.
Step 3: Now, right-click on the unallocated space on the USB drive, click New Simple Volume, click Next, click Next again (don’t change Simple volume size), click Next once again, choose file system as NTFS and finally, click Next again. That’s it!
Also check out our how to shrink or extend partitions in Windows 10 guide.
On Windows 10, whenever you get a new hard drive, it's important to format it before you start dumping files. The reason is that you want to ensure that the drive is working correctly, completely clean, and free of malware or malicious code that may harm your installation and personal files.
And it's not just a good practice for new drives, but for used hard drives too (especially those previously connected to a different OS), as using the proper formatting, you can avoid issues and compatibility problems.
Basically, when you format a hard drive, you're deleting all the data residing on the storage, and you start clean with a compatible file system (including NTFS, FAT32, or exFAT), which in this case Windows 10 understands to read and write data.
There are many methods available to format a hard drive, but using Disk Management could be considered one of the best options for most users.
In this Windows 10 guide, we'll walk you through the steps to correctly format a traditional hard drive or Solid-State Drive (SSD), whether it already has a partition or it was never initialized.
How to format existing partition using Disk Management
If you have a hard drive already configured with a partition, you can just format the existing partition to erase its content and start fresh with a clean drive.
To format a partition using Disk Management, use these steps:
- Open Start.
- Search for Disk Management and click the top result to open the experience.
- Right-click the new hard drive and select the Format option.
- In the 'Value label' field, type a descriptive name for the drive.
- Use the 'File system' drop-down menu, and select NTFS (recommended for Windows 10).
- Use the 'Allocation unit size' drop-down menu, and select the Default option.
- Check the Perform a quick format option.Quick Tip: While performing a quick format wipes the drive faster, it doesn't check if the drive is damaged. On the other hand, when clearing the option, a full format will be performed, which not only wipes the drive clean, but it'll also check for bad sectors. It's an option that could take several hours, but it's a good practice to make sure the hard drive is in working conditions.
- Unless necessary, clear the Enable file and folder compression option.
- Click the OK button.
- Click the OK button again in the warning message.
Once you've completed the steps, the system will format the selected partition on the drive, and then you can start using it to store files.
How to create and format new partition using Disk Management
If you happen to have a hard drive that was never formatted, you'll need to initialize and create a new partition before you can format it.
Typically, you'll know when a hard drive doesn't have a partition, because it'll not appear in File Explorer, and on Disk Management, it'll appear as unallocated space.
To properly set up a blank hard drive, use these steps:
- Open Start.
- Search for Disk Management and click the top result to open the experience.
- Right-click the hard drive marked as 'Unknown' and 'Not Initialized,' and select Initialize Disk.
- Check the disk to initialize.
- Select the partition style:
- Master Boot Record (MBR) for hard drives smaller than 2TB in size.
- GUID Partition Table (GPT) for hard drives larger than 2TB in size.
- Click the OK button.
- Right-click the Unallocated space, and select the New Simply Value option.
- Click the Next button.
- Under the 'Simple volume size in MB' section, leave the default size if you're planning to use the entire hard drive to store files. Otherwise, specify the amount of space in megabytes that you want to allocate for the partition.
- Click the Next button.
- Use the 'Assign the following drive letter' drop-down menu to select a letter for the new hard drive.
- Click the Next button.
- Use the 'File system' drop-down menu, and select NTFS (recommended for Windows 10).
- Use the 'Allocation unit size' drop-down menu, and select the Default option.
- In the 'Value label' field, type a descriptive name for the drive.
- Check the Perform a quick format option.Quick Tip: If you prefer a full format, clear the quick format option. Just keep in mind that depending on the size of the drive, it can take hours to finish.
- Unless necessary, clear the Enable file and folder compression option.
- Click the Next button.
- Click the Finish button.
After completing the steps, the new hard drive will be initialized, partitioned, and properly formatted.
If you're having trouble using Disk Management to format a hard drive, because of data corruption or other severe issues, you can use the DiskPart command-line tool to fix the problem.
While we're focusing this guide on Windows 10, the steps outlined above will also work on Windows 8.1 and Windows 7.
More Windows 10 resources
For more helpful articles, coverage, and answers to common questions about Windows 10, visit the following resources: