How to create a (second) virtual USB drive on a external harddrive

Question

I want to be able to have two USB Drives displayed when I plug my hard drive in, one obviously is the harddrive, the other one should be a virtual drive.

On the long run I want to be able to create a recovery drive on my external hard drive without deleting everything that is on it.

Any Ideas how to accomplish (either of) these things? Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You can do this by partitioning your usb drive.
The structure that stores all your files on a disk is called the filesystem and there is nothing preventing you from putting more than one on a single physical disk.
I only ever do this on Linux using GParted, but I found a Windows alternative here: http://www.disk-partition.com/free-partition-manager.html

Be careful to back up your files beforehand and make sure you are editing the right device.
Shrink the big partition on your usb drive from the right, creating an empty space on your disk.
Create a new partition (fat32 if it asks) in the unused space.
Also remember to try and avoid moving the left side of a filesystem. This can take hours to complete, whereas moving the right side should take a couple of minutes at most.