i have a hp laptop which currently has no HDD installed into it,so i decided to install windows to my Western Digital my passport 2TB external hard drive.
i found two article on how to install windows on external hard drive.
one using the waik and one easy install with wintousb(both article available on into windows website).
now in both article at some point it says i shoud format the hard drive.
so my first question is can i make another partition separate from my data partition on the same hard drive and use that as windows partition without losing any data ?
secondly what are the chances that my data gets lost at some point(consider that i have no backup of my data and the data is much more crucial then having windows) ?
i currently have Ubuntu 15.04 install on the same external hard drive on it's own partition.
Best Answer
Firstly to answer your questions:
Yes, you can make another partition, but it is rather complicated and risky. You can use tools like "GParted" or similar to resize a partition on your external drive and create a new partition in the freed space. You cannot use GParted from the Ubuntu installation, because the system partition would be blocked. You need to boot GParted live from USB or CD. However, I strongly recommend NOT doing this if you cannot afford losing the entire data, due to the following reasons:
If the process is interrupted your data might be lost, or you might need a very time consuming procedure to recover the data.
In case your data is not that important and you can afford to lose it, then maybe you can try to resize the partitions.
I am not 100% confident about that but my impression is that there is sometimes a difference between a GParted formatted partition and a Windows formatted one, even if you use the same NTFS format. In order to avoid errors, I prefer formatting with Windows itself and formatting the whole drive from scratch (no resizing).
In this case I strongly discourage you from meddling with the external drive's partitions. In your shoes I would also create a second copy of this data - you never know, disks go defective sometimes (10 years on paper, but I would not take chances).
And now some ideas:
I wish you good luck.