So I've been running out of room on my PC so I thought I'd add another HDD, one from my old laptop to be specific. It had windows 8 on it and is fucked up into about 5 useless partitions, after using Windows' absolute fucking garbage partitioning software I found out that it didn't do anything (i.e. unable to partition HDD/ shrink the 5 volumes to 1), but instead it bloody well changed all my other drives to "simple partitions" as apposed to "primary partitions".
Now this isn't an issue unless one of you guys tell me that it is, because i don't know if it is or not and my PC seems to be running fine, it just fucks me off seeing it like that every time I go in there because I didn't do it, some idiopt at Microsoft did.
The other problem is with a portable HDD, I had 500GB of steam games backed up on it and i wanted to delete them all, after the useless operating system told me that it couldn't handle it for no good reason at all i decided to go and format the son of a bitch, after that the drive is now un-usable, it doesn't show how much free space it has, it just says NTFS and that's it.
I would be VERY grateful if any of you can help me through this unfathomable mistake that has happened.
P.s. If you hear of any mass killings in the news tonight, then that might've been me.
I advise you use Diskpart (in a command prompt type diskpart and it will launch).
Just be VERY careful as to which drive you are selecting, especially if you are using the "clean" command.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc766465(v=ws.10).aspx
Thanks for the quick reply. i have decided in the end to just back up my data and re install windows completely as it'll be the easiest thing to do. The 2nd part of this ordeal is here https://teksyndicate.com/forum/hdds-ssds/whats-best-way-deal-c/184372
Okay so those 5 partitions you're seeing are supposed to be there and they are best practice for GPT formatted drives.
When I format Windows 7, I use 3 partitions because having only 1 is a bad idea for when you need to re-install. It makes more sense to split up the OS and Data drives so when the user messes up their OS they can re-install their OS without touching their data.
For Windows 7 and above, when using GPT disks, MS recommends 5 in order to put the bootloaders for other operating systems into a partition that won't be deleted if windows messes up and for better UEFI compatibility. Windows XP and prior did not handle recovery environments and dual-boot situations well but now MS has integrated that functionality (that usually had to be added afterwards by OEMs) into the setup process greatly simplifying the deployment process. At least the first 4 are psudo-but-not-really-required to get Windows 8 and above to run on GPT disks and there's no reason to get mad at MS for doing it in the most scalable way. Which means I'm going to be using 6 partitions (seperate OS from data) when deploying Windows in the future as UEFI becomes more common.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825686.aspx
IT ALL MAKES SENSE. Don't get mad at them (or me) >.<