On 06/12/2021 12:12, Chris Hogg wrote:
> 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.
So basically you need to delete all the existing partitions, and replace
them with a single larger one which you can then format.
> 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?
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.
--
Cheers,
John.
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