i have an old hard drive?

Question

i got a housing to convert it to external, easy enough.
it's got 3 partitions on it. how do i format back to just one partition? (there is no data on it that i need to save-that was easy enough too.) just want one big blank drive.

Answer 1

1) If you dont care about deleting the data:
Goto My Computer>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk Management (on the left pane) Just delete the paritions, format

2) If you care about the data and want to merger the partitions with the data still intact. Use a program like Partition Magic

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Answer 2

You can download a disk utility program from the drive manufacturer that will allow you to reformat the drive. Once you have reformatted, you can set up a new partition on the drive, which can use the entire available space.


The other way to do this, if you have Xp, is to set the drive up and mount it to your computer so it can see the drive.

I would assume you have either a USB or firewire drive housing.

Once the drive is set up and you can see it in My Computer. Go into your control panel and open Administrative Tools.

Next select Computer Management and then select Disk Management from the left hand menu.

You will see a graphical dipiction of all the drives on your computer. C:, any optical drives, as well as the three drives on one disk for your external drive.

Start at the right on the external drive and right click on the section of the drive in the graphic and select delete. Do this for each segment until the entire drive has bee deleted.

You can then reformat and set up a new partition in the drive. All from this graphical interface.

Answer 3

somthing like partition logic or partition magic would make it easy ...