Windows 10: How to make a bootable Windows 10 installer on one partition of an external hard drive

So I want to reinstall Windows as my laptop has been running ridiculously slow lately, so I downloaded the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool.

I took out my USB 3.0 External Hard Drive as that would be incredibly faster than my USB 2.0 flashdrives, so I went into Disk Management and created a 32 GB FAT32 partition on it.

When I went to the Media Creation Tool, I specified it to make the FAT32 partition bootable so it would not interfere with any of my files on the other partition.

When it finished, it still wiped my entire drive even through I specified it to only format and install on the FAT32 partition.

Can someone help me with this? I just want it to make one partition bootable while not formatting the entire thing in the process.

:)

 

W7 Hard drive partition issue

to get rid of that 100 meg windows partition that setup creates for you on a new install on a blank hdd:

- press shift+f10 when on the partition management screen in setup <-- this opens a command prompt
- diskpart <-- start the windows command line partition management tool
- list disk <--- list the installed hdds in this computer for the next step
- select disk 0 <- might have to replace 0 with the number of the correct disk
- clean <-- this will erase all data on the disk you selected one step up- dont use the wrong disk!
- create partition primary <- creates a primary partition taking up all space on the drive, adjust the command if necessary
- exit, exit to exit diskpart and the command prompt
- click refresh in partition manager and select your newly created partition and install to that

 

Partition SSD during windows 10 install

I'm assembling a new PC and running a fresh windows 10 install. I'd like to know how to partition the ssd into 2 separate partitions during the windows install (I'm using a bootable usb drive to install Windows).

I want to know if I need to input specific settings for those partitions or if it's all automatic?

I need one partition for Windows on and another for my documents. The ssd has 960gb size.

So I'm guessing it has about 60gb over-provisionning. I could leave out a bit more, but it probably doesn't matter that much

 

moving my linux mint partition to another hard drive

That would be safer indeed. To avoid any confusion, i would suggest you unplug your 3TB during installation.

After the installation, plug the 3TB back online. At that point, both hard drives will be bootable, so you'll have to set the highest priority to your 1TB in the bios boot sequence.

Boot on your freshly installed linux mint, and delete the old linux mint partition + associated swap, then run the sudo update-grub command, and your windows partition should be added to the bootloader menu.