second hard drive

[leeray]

I have an 80 gigabyte hard drive with Windows XP installed on it. It took
it out of my other computer after the mother board got fried.

I have installed it as my secondary hard drive in my Compaq Presario. I have
formatted the two partitions on the hard drive but I do not know how to
remove the second partition. This new computer does not have a floppy drive
(probably not necessary for your instructions). How do I completely format
this hard drive and remove the extended 5 gigabyte partition? I want to
have access to all 80 gigs for storage.

I realize there is a program called Partition Magic, I want to learn how to
do this manually and not rely on third party software. ........keeps an old
guy's mind healthy to learn! thanks. Lee

 

[Matrix]

-----Original Message-----
I have an 80 gigabyte hard drive with Windows XP installed on it. It took
it out of my other computer after the mother board got fried.

I have installed it as my secondary hard drive in my Compaq Presario. I have
formatted the two partitions on the hard drive but I do not know how to
remove the second partition. This new computer does not have a floppy drive
(probably not necessary for your instructions). How do I completely format
this hard drive and remove the extended 5 gigabyte partition? I want to
have access to all 80 gigs for storage.

I realize there is a program called Partition Magic, I want to learn how to
do this manually and not rely on third party

software. ........keeps an old

guy's mind healthy to learn! thanks. Lee


.

If you're using XP you can go to Disk Manager (Right
Click on My Computer, select Manage and go to Storage,
Disk Management)
There you will see your HDD. Right click on the Extended
partition and select delete.
(note: you can not delete the extended partition if you
have logical drives, if you have logical drives, delete
them first)
After you have deleted all the partitions, create a single
partition and format it.
And you will have one disk.

Enjoy...

 

[george]

Go into Computer Management. Can be done via Control Panel, Administrative
tools or right click My Computer and chose Manage.
In there you'll find Disk Management.
Select the second HD in the interface, right click and investigate the
options you get there.
I'm sure you'll be able to work it out.
If not, you have to delete the partitions on there, one by one until your
entire drive holds no more partitions. (GUI will tell you that)
Then you can create one new partition for the entire HD and format it.

hth
George

 

[leeray]

Thanks for the info. I was able to use the Disk Manager to delete the
partitions but it still shows 5 gigs missing. Is there a start-up disk
(CD..I have no floppy disk) for Windows XP that I can make from a web site
to do an FDISK on this Hard Drive or is there another way to wipe out that
hidden partition?


Go into Computer Management. Can be done via Control Panel, Administrative
tools or right click My Computer and chose Manage.
In there you'll find Disk Management.
Select the second HD in the interface, right click and investigate the
options you get there.
I'm sure you'll be able to work it out.
If not, you have to delete the partitions on there, one by one until your
entire drive holds no more partitions. (GUI will tell you that)
Then you can create one new partition for the entire HD and format it.

hth
George

 

[george]

AFAIK Disk Manager shows you *all* partitions on a disk, so basically you
should *see* everything you have on that disk and thus be able to manipulate
it any way you want to.

You can start your system from your XP CD, get the setup going and along the
line indicate you want to do a 'Recover' and you want that done 'manually'.
The process will then load a very little, tiny, command line oriented XP,
called the Recovery Console.
In that environment you have a few select commands at your disposal (check
out Help and Support, beforehand), one of them being FDISK.
Not sure what you mean by "I have no floppy disk". (diskettes or drive)
For a website check out www.bootdisk.com

hth
george

 

[Alex Nichol]

I have installed it as my secondary hard drive in my Compaq Presario. I have
formatted the two partitions on the hard drive but I do not know how to
remove the second partition. This new computer does not have a floppy drive
(probably not necessary for your instructions). How do I completely format
this hard drive and remove the extended 5 gigabyte partition? I want to
have access to all 80 gigs for storage.

In XP go to Control Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management, select
Disk Management and look lower right for the graphic of the drive.

R-click in each of the unwanted partitions and take Delete. Then
r-click in the resulting Unallocated space and take Create Partition