▷ How to partition usb or sd card with windows 10

This time we are going to see how we can partition USB from our Windows 10 system through the native applications Hard Disk Manager and Diskpart. Also, this process is perfectly applicable to partition an SD card or portable hard drive.

Index of contents

On many occasions, our portable storage devices have considerable storage capacities, even going up to 128 GB in USB 3.0 drives or even more. Similarly, SD cards are also a good claim to be able to store our files and take them anywhere.

With this type of device, we can even install one or more operating systems and make them portable so that they can be run from a different computer than ours. It is precisely for this reason that it will be extremely interesting to create at least two partitions on the drive to store files and an operating system, or in your case, simply to have our files in various partitions well organized as if on a hard drive. concerned.

Format USB using disk manager

The first way we have available to format a USB device or SD card is through the Windows graphical tool, the Hard Disk Manager.

To access it, we are going to press the key combination " Windows + X " to open the Windows tools menu, note, it is not the start menu. We will identify this menu as having a gray background. Here we will choose the option " Disk Management ".

Now we are in an interface in which we must pay special attention to the list of hard drives and storage units that are installed. In each of these units we can see a graphic representation of the configuration of its file system, such as the type and partitions it has. If the blue box corresponding to a unit is compact and without divisions, it will mean that there is only one partition, and we see more than one is because we have several partitions.

Let's start, we identify our USB drive by the storage capacity it has, in our case it is the last of all, 15 GB. We must know that all the data we have we will lose when performing these actions.

Making partitions and formatting the USB

The first thing we have to do is right click on the blue region and choose " Delete volume ".

Next, we will click on the box, now represented in black, to choose " New simple volume ".

We will see a wizard for creating the partitions. We start by clicking " Next " to access the first batch of options. Here we will have to choose the storage space of the first partition to create.

We are going to partition USB with two of them, one of for example 10 GB and the other of 5 (the rest). So in this window we will write "10000", that is, 10, 000 MB or 10 GB.

Now we continue with the following window, in it we must choose the option " Assign the following drive letter:" and we choose the letter we want, as long as it is not used. We keep going.

We chose a file system for the partition, as it is a small device, the best option is to use FAT32, but we can perfectly choose NTFS for them. We put a name to identify the drive, and choose " Quick Format." We would already have a partition made.

To make another one with the rest of the available space, we will carry out the same procedure.

The end result will be as follows:

Partition SD or USB with Diskpart

Now let's go through the same procedure, but with the tool in Diskpart command mode. To run it, we will have to start a Command Prompt (CMD) window with administrator permissions, or Windows PowerShell.

We are going to use the latter, which will also be available in the tools menu shown at the beginning, so click on " Windows PowerShell (Administrator) ". The use of Diskpart is very intuitive, and the process is very similar to that seen graphically.

We start by writing this command and hitting Enter to execute it:

diskpart

The next thing we must do is find our USB to start working with it. We wrote:

list disk

We must identify the USB by its TOTAL storage space, here no partitions are shown, only full disks. We look at their number (in our case 2) and now write:

select disk

Now we are going to clean the USB to start making the partitions, this action is identical to the previous one of "Delete volume". In this case we can do it with this command:

clean

Now we can create the partitions that we want, for this example we are going to create three of them, each of 5 GB (5000MB), go there:

create partition primary size = 5000

create partition primary size = 5000

create partition primary

The last one we leave without number so that it takes all the remaining space.

Now let's list these partitions:

list partition

The next thing will be to format each one of them to activate them and make them functional, because our USB is still useless, we are also going to choose NTFS as the file system. This process will be identical in the three partitions:

select partition

format fs = NTFS label = quick

activate

assign letter =

Remember to choose a letter that is not already taken. We will already have a partition ready to use, now we do the same with the other two.

Well, in this way we have been able to partition USB in an easy way. Remember that partitioning SD or portable disk is exactly the same.

You may also be interested in this information:

We hope you found this tutorial helpful. Windows gives us enough options to do that without needing to install anything. Why do you want to partition a USB?