Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Creating a partition on an external HD for an encrypted Volume

<< < (2/4) > >>

steeladept:
Or you could just reformat the USB stick to NTFS natively.  It is just like formatting a hard drive, but you just target the Stick instead.  Another alternative that I use (though I use it on an NTFS formatted USB stick) is to create multiple Truecrypt containers.  Each container can be a different partition or just a file in the partition.  You can then use TrueCrypt to mount the files as favorites.  Lastly you can even make the containers have a single password and use a script to pass that password to each file.  I wrote one like that already that is quite useful.

jdd:
The drive I am referring to is an external USB 300 GB drive that has about 50% free space available.  I am not sure of the exact terminology but the entire 300GB is presently in an FAT32 format.

I want to create an NTFS partition so that I can use Truecrypt to store a virtual encrypted Volume that is far in excess of the 4 GB limit for FAT32.  But I have never added a partition to a drive and I want to make sure I doon't loose the existing data.

Will Partition Magic do that?

f0dder:
You can use Windows' built-in "convert" tool to non-destructively convert the partition to NTFS, if you don't need it to be FAT32.

Otherwise you'll need either
a) re-partitioning the drive to have a FAT32 and a NTFS partition (destructive)
b) use a tool (like PartitionMagic) to shrink the FAT32 partition (nondestructive, but remember backups) and create a new NTFS partition.

jdd:
Let me make sure I understand correctly.   :-\

Let's say I have a FAT32 300GB drive D.  I can create a second 50 GB partition called T: which would be NTFS, and reduce the D: partition to 250GB while preserving the FAT32 format of D:, and preserving the data non-destructively, correct?

CWuestefeld:
Given the correct tools, yes. Partition Magic is one such tool, but I believe that there are other free alternatives. (And you will make backups just in case, right?)

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page