Position : Tutorial Series - Format and Resize Partition With DiskGenius- How To Use Hard Drive (VII)

Format and Resize Partition With DiskGenius- How To Use Hard Drive (VII)

This articles continue to explain how to manage hard drive partitions with DiskGenius.

Format partition

The previous article has mentioned that formatting of partition is the process creating file system to the partition. And last chapter introduces that users are able to write desired file system when creating new partitions. Actually, the process of creating new partition includes the operation of creating file system. Thus there is no need to perform extra operations to format partitions.

You may need to format partition during using hard drive, and some scenarios are listed as follows:

You want to erase all data off partition, and formatting is the best option, which doesn't need deleting files or folders one by one;
Error happens to partition and partition becomes inaccessible, then Windows will prompts error messages and ask to format the partition;
Due to certain reason, you need change file system for partition, for example, convert FAT to NTFS. In that case, you should partition.

It's quite easy to format partition with the assistance of DiskGenius. Select target partition and right mouse button, then select item "Format Current Partition", as following picture:

format partition

Then a dialog box pops up on which you can select file system format before starting formatting, as below:

format options

It's easy to format partition though, you need to pay attention to two points:

1. Formatting erases all files and directories off the partition, so please backup important data first.
2. If you want to fix partition error by formatting and the partition contains important files, then you should backup data before formatting, otherwise it'll make data recovery difficulty.

By the way, DiskGenius is also a great data recovery tool, and you can retrieve lost files with the feature: "Recover Lost Files".

Delete and hide partition

When a partition gets deleted, disk space taken by the partition will turn to free; if partition is hidden, it won't be seen in "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer, but it still exists on hard drive.

Deleting or hiding partition with DiskGenius is as easy as formatting partition. Right click partition and select corresponding items, see the first picture.

Resize partition without data loss

This feature mean changing partition size without doing harm to files in the partition, which is one of the most useful and effective partition operations. DiskGenius makes it easy to resize, extend or shrink partitions: select partition, right click mouse and select item "Resize Partition", see the first picture.

Then, you can decide partition size, starting and ending location on the pop-up dialog box, as follows:

resize options

It should be noted that resizing partition is a dangerous operation, for data on the partition may get damaged once error or unexpected accident happens to the resizing process. What kind of error or accident may happen to the process? There are many possible factors, such as hard drive bad sector, file system error, unexpected power failure, etc. All of them can risk data security when you are resizing partitions.

Therefore, it is strongly recommended that users should backup important data before performing partition resizing to ensure data safety.

Others

Select partition on DiskGenius main interface, and right click mouse (see picture 1), then you can see many other functions on the context menu apart from format current partition, delete partition, hide partition and resize partition. Those functions like "assign new drive letter" "set volume name" are not mentioned in this articles, but they are quite intuitive and easy, so I'm not going to explain them one after another. As to functions such as "clone partition" "recover lost files" will be introduced in following articles.

This article, together with last chapter, talks about basic operations to partition, and next article will represent how to backup partition.