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Removing a hidden partition Freeing up disk space

#1 lather

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Posted 06 November 2010 - 03:09 PM

Just got myself a new hard drive to use as a second drive in a laptop. Although it should be a 60GB drive, when I put it into the laptop, I noticed it was only reporting 51GB. So I went to Computer Management, checked the drive and, sure enough, there's a hidden restore partition on it.

So, I want to get rid of this hidden partition so that I can use it for storage space, but can't delete it via Disk Management. I'm thinking of putting the drive into one of my spare laptops as the primary drive and booting from a Windows XP install disk. I'm hoping that this will then allow me to delete the hidden partition and repartition the drive so that its all available for use in Windows.

The question is, does anyone know if this will work? Or is there another way to remove this unwanted hidden partition without having to go through the whole performance of ripping out the old drive, etc?

#2 cryptodan

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Posted 06 November 2010 - 03:28 PM

What kind of drive is it, and can you get an external enclosure?

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#3 Andrew

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Posted 06 November 2010 - 03:44 PM

If Windows' built in disk manager won't do it, then I would just go with a better partition manager/editor like GParted LiveCD.

This post has been edited by Andrew: 06 November 2010 - 03:45 PM

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#4 keyboardNinja

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Posted 06 November 2010 - 03:57 PM

EASEUS can do it, as well.

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#5 lather

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Posted 06 November 2010 - 08:02 PM

cryptodan, on 06 November 2010 - 03:28 PM, said:

What kind of drive is it, and can you get an external enclosure?

The drive is an ex-IBM Hitachi HTS541060G9AT00 2.5" IDE drive, and yes, I do have both an external enclosure and an IDE to USB adaptor for use with bare drives.

Update:
I used EASEUS, and that did the job! I think I'll use that from now on for most of my disk management tasks.

This post has been edited by lather: 07 November 2010 - 03:42 PM