Disk Partition Tool Bootable Usb

[Salvator Grimard]

This is a common need related to the partition manager in the forums. Given that, this article will guide you to create a bootable USB partition manager so to help you safely manage hard drive partitions without booting up OS

Briefly speaking, a USB bootable partition manager is burnt with a partition magic software ISO file. With a bootable partition manager, Windows users can boot their PCs into a WinPE state from a USB bootable drive and manage partitions flexibly and safely.

If you are looking for a complete guide for creating a bootable partition manager, follow the tutorials below, we'll show guide you to create a partition magic bootable USB and safely manage disk partitions without booting up Windows OS.

EaseUS Partition Master is the best partition manager for both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. EaseUS Partition Master can create a partition manager bootable USB that allows Windows users to boot PC from the USB drive to safely manage hard drive partitions.

Step 1. To create a bootable disk of EaseUS Partition Master, you should prepare a storage media, like a USB drive, flash drive or a CD/DVD disc. Then, correctly connect the drive to your computer.

Step 3. You can choose the USB or CD/DVD when the drive is available. However, if you do not have a storage device at hand, you can also save the ISO file to a local drive, and later burn it to a storage media. Once made the option, click the "Create" button to begin.

[1] "Resize/Move" enables you to adjust space of a selected disk partition as wish. Right-lick "Resize/Move", you can shrink a volume, extend the other one, or create unallocated space for special use.

[2] "Clone" aims to make two identical hard disks or partitions with the same layout and content. You can use the "Clone" feature to upgrade a hard disk, replace a failing one, backup the drive data and so on.

[4] "Format" is frequently used in many situations. By formatting a drive partition, you can alter the file system, fix some corruption issues, and sometimes remove viruses and malware.

[7] Conversion between GPT and MBR, NTFS and FAT32, and Basic to Dynamic is getting more and more popular among EaseUS Partition Master customers. Besides all the listed benefits, there are so many functional yet practical features are waiting you to explore.

I'd like to see the full How-To on how to use manual partitioning during Ubuntu installation. The existing guides (at least those I found here) cover only automatic part and leave untouched the manual part (or extremely short and contain no pictures).

As LiveWireBT noticed in comments, it is recommended to place root partition onto primary partition on MBR scheme disks. However, it belongs to personal taste. Sometimes it's even better to put /boot directory on primary and leave root on logical partition.

Optionally disable fast startup and probably disable hibernation, if it is activated and you intend to access the Windows partition with Ubuntu. Run powercfg.cpl and navigate to Power Options > System Settings through "Choose what the power button does".

Attention! No, you don't want to erase the entire disk and Windows along with it. Choose the Something else option if you see this screen. (Something else may be the most difficult option to understand, but considering existing bugs you know what you will get.)

I will not cover how to create mdadm arrays here. There are a lot of articles around the Internet. However, there is one major problem: Ubiquity installer doesn't account for the arrays created in the live session, so you'll probably get unbootable system after installation on such array.

Important: Install /boot onto one of partition outside the array because GRUB doesn't support mdadm. In my case, it's /dev/sda3. If you want more quick booting of your system, it should be placed at the beginning of the disk.

Now suppose that we are going to install Ubuntu 11.04 and at first of the installation process we will meet Allocate drive space screen (the most important step in the installation process). In Allocate drive space screen Select Something else to partition your disk drive manually.

"How do I fix my computer/hard drive when the PC can't boot up successfully?" "How can I manage my hard drive if my hard drive is broken?" These questions can be found in the forum every second day. The bootable partition manager can easily solve the related problems. This tutorial will give a full guide on how to create and run bootable partition manager on USB.

Usually, so many people will try to create a portable partition manager when the booting issue happens. Thus, checking and repairing the internal hard drive is one of the most important purposes of creating a partition manager on a USB drive.

1. To create a bootable partition manager for a USB flash drive you need to use a third-party tool - AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional. This manager supports installing it on a USB drive or CD/DVD. And you will have a portable partition manager. When you can't boot up your PC. Insert this USB drive into your PC, and enter BIOS to boot from it. You can try to fix the issue or manage your hard drive with its functions.

This USB boot partition tool provides an intuitive interface that makes all the operations simple and easy. You can follow its instructions to finish a process easily. This manager allows you to undo steps if you misclick a button, it helps PC beginners control their PCs and drives. So you don't need to worry if you are unfamiliar with partition management.

The process of creating a WinPE bootable USB drive will take a few minutes. After that, a full partition manager will be installed on this USB or CD/DVD, you can connect it to another Windows PC to run it. Then go to the next part to see how to enter BIOS to set it as the boot drive.

And you will see the AOMEI Partition Assistant, and repair or manage your hard drive with its different features. As a powerful and all-in-one partition manager for Windows, AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional supports various features, including: creating/deleting/formatting/cloning partitions, changing the file system, and a partition table for a drive. Besides, it helps you to check your partition with CHKDSK.exe and to rebuild MBR when your hard drive crashes, a storage device, a corrupted file system, or other issues.

This is how to create a bootable partition manager on a USB drive. After booting from such a tool, you still have control over all connected storage devices with AOMEI Partition Assistant. In addition, it has more advanced features, like managing dynamic disk, extending system partition, allocating free space, cloning OS from a smaller drive to a larger one, and so on.

Although the Windows built-in Disk Management utility has an option to shrink the bootable partition, it only allows me to shrink it roughly by half, even though only 20 GiB on the partition is used. As far as I understand, system unmovable files lie in the middle of the partition, preventing Disk Management utility to do what I want.

P.S.: I have tried to use the third-party GParted utility, and after shrinking the partition, Windows 7 stopped booting, with a BSoD. System recovery didn't work, and I had to do factory recover. Since this is a long process, I would like to avoid doing it again :) So, please, suggest only proven solutions.

In the low-level tasks, like working with an HDD system partition, I prefer to use native tools as much as possible, and switch to third-party tools only as a last resort, if none of native tools worked. So, directed by harrymc, I gave Windows Disk Management another try.

I first turned Virtual Memory and System Restore off, removed System Volume Information folders, and after that Disk Management utility allowed me to shrink the C: partition as much as I needed. After that I turned the features back on.

The following instructions may help you to identify what application or component is preventing your partition to shrink. First you need to find the latest event with ID 259 in the Windows Event Log (see Event Viewer / Windows Logs / Application). The event is generated when the system analyses a partition, and if you have already tried to shrink a partition via right-clicking on it in the disk management snap-in, then the event should be there. Another way to make the system analyze a partition is to run the Windows built-in defragmentation utility. The event tells you the last unmovable file or just the number of the last cluster of such a file. It also tells you the complete command to run from the command line to get more details about the last unmovable file. (Alternatively, you can probably also try to calculate the cluster number as min allowed partition size divided by cluster size, and then run the fsutil command with the appropriate parameters).

The filename will give you a hint to guess, what program or feature is locking your partition. And then you can turn it off or uninstall, and see if it helped. In my case turning off Virtual Memory and System Restore was enough. Sometimes it is also necessary to turn off hibernation, etc. And sometimes partition defragmentation may also help. Also, as stated in the WindowsITPro article, Windows Search Index files and Internet Explorer temporary files can also be "unmovable". Sometimes just disabling the System Restore and Windows Search Index will automatically remove unmovable files from the System Volume Information folder, and sometimes you may need to remove the folder manually after that.

P.S.: Thanks everyone for answers. Probably third-party tools would also work in my case, and probably they are easier to use, but as I have already told, for such kind of tasks I prefer to use native tools as much as possible. Also, personal thanks to harrymc for the important hint.

WARNING: Recently there have been several reports of problems when resizing file systems using gparted-live-0.5.0-3. In the case of the NTFS file system, The error message seen after the partition is resized is:

c80f0f1006