How to Partition a USB Drive or a Memory Card – Windows 10

Windows 10 lets you manage drives and create partitions of your hard drives through a utility called Disk Management. It’s best for both SD cards and hard drives.

After the Windows 10 Anniversary update, you can partition a USB or SD card with disk management. Before this update, you couldn’t apply partition on a USB or SD card thru disk management.

Microsoft fixed these deficiencies later on. Refer below to learn partition a USB or SD card with Disk Management.

Partition a USB Drive or a Memory Card

Insert the USB drive you want to partition.  I used an 8GB USB for this you can use 16 GB if you want to. Mine was blank and newly formatted and that’s the safe way to go.

Back up your data if you have data on your USB. If you have files in your drive, it won’t let you shrink the drives down to a size where your files won’t be able to fit inside either one of the drives. This is why it’s best to start with an empty SD card or USB.

Open Disk Management by right-clicking on “This PC” and select Manage.

Once computer management is open click on disk management under storage tab.

Similarly, you can open up the disk management by writing it in Windows search bar.

Now right click on the USB drive and click on create a new volume.

Now it will open up a wizard that will create a new partition. Select the size of the partitions you want to make. You need to enter the custom size as we are going to create multiple partitions. Click Next.

Now select the drive latter and select label the drive. Then click next.

Select ‘NTFS’ from the File system drop-down on the Format Partition screen. Click the box to uncheck the quick format option and to allow Disk Management to format the drive. Once formatting completes, you should see the second drive appear in File Explorer.

Once you are done, it will create a partition of size we have defined in your USB drive or memory card.

Now follow the same process to create a new volume of unallocated disk space, it will again start the disk creation wizard and you need to enter the same custom disk space. It will create a new partition for your disk drive or memory card.

This is how a Partition can be done successfully.

Muhammad Imran Habib

Imran is a technology evangelist with 8 years of experience working with some of the Industry leading companies. Imran's expertise includes On-Prem/Virtual Infrastructure deployments, IT Solutions for SMEs, End User Computing Support.

You may also like...