SOLVED Remove Recovery & OEM Partitions from hard drive

[ekilyekil]

Hello.

My Acer 8943g notebook came with two Hitachi Travelstar 5K500.B 500 GB internal hard drives. I've replaced them with faster 2.5" 7200 drives. I have put one of the original Hitachi drives into a Dynamode USB caddy for use as extra general storage.

The problem I have is that the Hitachi drive that contained the factory-installed Windows 7 OS has some hard-to-remove partitions: Recovery Partition (15 GB) and OEM Partition (3.5 GB).

You can see it in the attached ekilyekil_disk-management.png. Disk 4 in that picture is the drive in the caddy (USB to ATA/ATAPI bridge). It had another 100 MB partition on it too, which I inadvertently deleted from within Windows Disk Management. Oops. I didn't know what I was doing.

After that I downloaded MiniTool Partition Wizard Home Edition v6.0. You can see from my other screenshot ekilyekil_partition-wizard.png that Partition Wizard calls it Disk 5 (not sure why the difference). So far I have used that program to 'wipe' the two small partitions. I guessed perhaps I would then be able Extend Volume in Windows Computer Management, but I guessed wrong.

I realised I was fumbling about with no real understanding of what I was doing. I thought: Join a nice forum and ask for some informed advice. So here I am doing just that.

My intention is to make this disk into an NTFS-formatted volume utilising all 465.76 GB. No system, no bootable device, just a nice 'n' easy storage volume. Can you help, please?

 

[Nibiru2012]

It's really not that hard. Using the Disk Management console, right-click on each partition of the drive and select "Delete". Then create your new entire partition for the hard drive.

You'll see the option to "Create Simple Volume". Choose that and you'll be good to go.

 

[ekilyekil]

Thanks Nibiru2012 for your reply. That worked fine. Using Partition Wizard I have deleted the unwanted parts and created a new partition. You're right, it wasn't hard. I think I'd got confused because the option to delete them wasn't available in Disk Management.

Have a good day!