Formatting Drive Correctly

[johnmccardelljr]

Hello,

I installed an M2 ssd card in conjunction with the hard drive already installed on the laptop. I successfully cloned the drive and now booting from the ssd. I re-formatted the hdd drive but the partitions are still showing on "My PC" as the drive space allocated for the recovery & the windows drive and also a small 200MB drive?

I am unable to consolidate into one drive. Is there some type of protection on the drive letters and not letting me make it unallocated space to create a big storage drive? How can I fix this? Also I redownloaded some games on the drive and stuck it on the storage drive - if there is a way to not remove these and have to download again it would help my frustration level haha.

Thank you all!

 

[Solandri]

Formatting is just wiping a partition. Your problem is that you have several extraneous partitions (boot, recovery). Those need to be deleted so the space is freed up, and new partition created which uses all that space. It should be doable in disk management.

My PC -> right-click -> Manage -> Disk Management -> right-click unneeded partitions and delete

But if that doesn't work (Microsoft has all sorts of fail-safe restrictions which often prevent you from doing what you need to do), you can use a third party partition manager. Do note that this one requires you to choose what you want to do, then click Apply to make it actually happen.

https/www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

You should be able to temporarily copy the downloaded games to your SSD, then once you've finished turning your HDD into a single storage partition, you can copy them back. Alternately, you can delete the unneeded partitions, then expand the space of the existing storage partition to use the freed-up space. That might take longer though, since the filesystem has to be kept consistent throughout the partition resize, and Disk Management might not be able to do it (it has funny rules about expanding partitions - use a partition manager instead). But either method should work.

 

[mbarnes86]

Hi
To ensure the new M2. Drive is correctly partitioned i suggest you disconnect the old hard drive power and data cables and make sure the system can boot up from the new M2 disk

Once you have proved this works provide details of the disk management view of the hard drive

Small partitions less than 1 GB can be ignored and any drive letters for them removed
To consolidate the space on the hard drive probably requires removing the small boot, recovery partitions using a bootable cd or usb with gparted (linux boot disk)
Then expanding the old c: partition into the freed space

Regards
Mike Barnes

 

[johnmccardelljr]

Thank you all. Solandri that worked like a charm! Super easy to do as well! I really appreciate the info. And thank you Mike I did boot up with the original hard drive disconnected from the system and everything worked great.

Have a great day!