Reformatting HDD, releasing full capacity

[Chris Mannion]

Mornin' all

I've just gone through a bit of a trial and error PC repair, as a result of which I have a spare hard-drive which at one point was set-up as a clean start for the PC with a new Windows install but now isn't needed so I've mounted it as an external drive for extra storage. The odd thing is that as part of the windows install process, I intended to create two partitions one 80gb partition for windows and program files and one 170gb for data but I obviously did something wrong and the 250gb drive now has only one 80gb partition, the rest of the space that should be available is nowhere to be seen.

Obviously I'd like to have the full drive capacity available, and I'm happy to reformat the drive since nothing installed on there is needed after all, however, in Vista if I right-click and choose Format I still only seem to be able to set the drive up with 80gb capacity. Is there any way of reformatting the drive so that I get it back to it's full 250gb?

 

[edijs]

I assume that you haven't tried this: go to Computer>Left-click>Manage. In the left pane select storage>disk management. It is quite probable that the second partition is not formated and thus windows doesn't show it. You have to initialize/format the partition (the partitioning should be quite self explanatory in the lower pane) and things should be working fine.

 

[Chris Mannion]

Thanks, I actually found something that sorted it for me not long after posting this. If anyone has any similar problems, what I did was to go to Control Panel - System and Maintenance - Administrative Tools - Create and format hard disk partions. This shows all disks and for each lists each partion along with any unallocated space. For my disk it showed the 80gb partition and the 170gb unallocated space. Rather than reformatting I was able to simply right click on the existing partion, choose Extend volume and grow that partition from 80gb to the full 250gb.

This is on Vista and requires administrator permisions.