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Solve : UNPARTITION AN EXTERNAL USB HARD DRIVE? |
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Answer» How do you unpartition an External USB hard drive? It shows two drive letters in windows explorer. "J" and "K". I have formatted both of these drives, but I can't figure out how to unpartition them and get them back to only one drive letter.FDISK is the partition and volume manager; you may be able to use that (I do not know if it works on removable drives) FDISK is the partition and volume manager; you may be able to use that (I do not know if it works on removable drives)The two partitions have drive names of J & K. If I type FDISK at a Dos prompt with K or J the system states that this is not a correct entry. There must me a command somewhere that says "combine" two drives into one. Thanks for your help. BTW-Computer is Dell 8400-1 Gig Ram-1Ghz in a network (router) with 4 other computers. It is interesting in that this computer can backup to an external hard drive that is on another computer in the network. The External hard drive I was trying to unpartition is attached to this (main) computer. I was going to give this external hard drive to my mother in law and wanted to unpartition it. The HD has 164 GB with each partition having about 80 GB. Both the J drive and the K drive have been formated and are clean. When I hook it up to her computer, I would assume it will be still partitioned. I think it can work well for her with the two partitions. She can alternate backups to each. That might be better than doing an unpartition. I bought a new 500 GB external HD and attached it to the same USB plug and it assigned a letter H. Again, Thanks for the answer. Joe Joe Graham & Joe, YES, Fdisk will work on a removeable drive. (It even works on a USB drive.) FDISK is a DOS utility. See the following for a thorough explanation. http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q255/8/67.ASP http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q255867/# Most of us use a Windows98 boot disk with key dos utilities on it. With Fdisk you would FIRST delete both of the partitions. (all of the data on that hard disk is permanently deleted.) Then create a new partition. After the new partition is created you need to reboot the system so that it reads the new partition table. Then format the drive. It's not a very friendly program, but does the job for FAT & FAT32. If you need NTFS, you will need something else. I use Partition Magic. It is able to do a lot more including NTFS and able to do it without any data loss, if that is a problem. Thanks for the info. I think I will just use this on my Mother-in-law's computer and leave the partition as it is. She can have two backup drives. Thanks again. JoeRight click My Computer / choose Manage / choose Disk MANAGEMENT / REPARTITION the drives here. Alan <>< |
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