Disc management question

[Chris Hogg]

I have a spare HDD that I would like to use as a back-up. Seagate

500GB nominal capacity. Examining it in Win10 Disc Management, it has three partitions: two, labeled X and Y, are primary partitions, each is 232.88 GB, NTFS. The third partition is 557MB, a recovery partition.

I would like to merge all three partitions into one, or at least merge the two larger partitions, but try as I might, I cannot see how to do it. I'm probably misunderstanding what I'm seeing. I can unallocate the two partitions by deleting their 'names' (X and Y) but that doesn't seem to get me anywhere. I'm just going round in circles ATM! Can someone give me simple step-by-step instructions, please?

I also have Macrium Reflect, if that helps.

[Sysadmin]

In Windows disk management, delete all partitions and re create what you need and format them.

[John Rumm]

So basically you need to delete all the existing partitions, and replace them with a single larger one which you can then format.

If you are in disk management, you should be able to right click on a volume (either in the list at the top, or on the graphical section below), and do "delete volume". Repeat for each of the partitions on the disk.

That should take you back to "Unallocated space" shown for the whole drive. You can then right click on that and select "New Simple Volume". That will create a new partition and you can then format it.

(Sometimes you can run into problems deleting some kinds of system protected partitions. If that is the case you can do it from the command link in diskpart - but cross that bridge if and when).

The other option to consider is rather than setting up a simple volume on the disk, you could add it to a storage pool in Win 10 Storage spaces instead. That allows you to create a virtual volume spanned over multiple disks much like yo can do with RAID, but it is flexible and expandable so you can add more space to a storage spaces group at a later date without rebuilding the whole thing.

[Chris Hogg]

That was what I'd already done, except that the small 'recovery' partition wouldn't allow me to delete it, and I never got the whole drive showing as 'unallocated disc space'. Perhaps I missed something.

So I started to explore diskpart. It looked above my capability grade, but I googled for instructions and by accident discovered AOMEI Partition Assistant, which seems to have done what I wanted.

That too is above my capability grade!

Thanks anyway.

[Dave Plowman (News]

Would it allow you to rename the partition?

I just stick an old PC drive on the Acorn and tell it to format it. It doesn't care about Windows partitions.

[Chris Hogg]

Academic now, but that small partition didn't allow me to do anything with it AFAICT.

That's rather what I expected to happen here, but no such luck!

[The Natural Philosopher]

A linux live CD can be handy here as it gives access to more than stick windows tools.

Modern disks have things likeEFI boot partitions instead of boot sectors so its not unusual to have bits of disk seemingly doing nothing, that have protected status. Bit like EU politicians really.

[John Rumm]

My unwritten inference was that if you get to that stage, post back and I can give you the commands to do it.

Yup there are a number of tools out there that will do what you need - the USB bootable version of Gparted is my usual go to for that kind of thing, but AOMEI will do it.

Its fairly easy - but you need to run the Manage Storage Spaces app rather than the normal disk management one. More useful when you have multiple drives to play with.

[Paul]

That's the difference between legacy (MSDOS) partitioning, and the newer GPT partitioning.

In Linux, gdisk is first try, fdisk is second try, based on evidence you find as you go:

sudo gdisk /dev/sda If evidence is legacy: sudo fdisk /dev/sda p p q q

In Windows, you can review a disk using Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc)

[Picture]

Paul