it looks like almost all the space on the the 500 GB drive is unallocated (Empty and not usable) You could just delete all the partitions on that disk and create one new partition for all the space I am guessing that drive was an OEM drive from another PC and the data was wiped.
Yeah ... I accidentally formatted my media storage drive instead of what I wanted as C: during a late night install ... lucky for me ... I had a backup. It would have ruined my day for sure if I didn't. lol
Yep Ive been there
Ohk well that's good to know about the simple volume thing.
My OS is on the 64GB and the 500GB is an old HDD from a laptop that had win8 that i've been trying to completely wipe so that I can use it as storage on this PC for old non-HD footage.
OK I think you will initialize the disk first to format it. just right click on it in the disk management window and select initialize.(You may chose to delete all the partitions on the disk first so that you get one partition of 500 GB) then right click on the drive and select format or create new partition or what ever the option is I cant remember at the moment.
I can't right click on any of the partitions except for the 400GB+ one because it just comes up with 'help' :/
And the one that comes up with more than help just has 'new simple volume' available.
can you right click on the square box on the left the one that has the total space for the drive?
Yup, it gives me "Convert to dynamic disk" and "properties" options.
Well New simple volume on the unallocated portion should give you access to that space IIDK why it isn't allowing you to remove those volumes. It might have to do with the way that they were created a protected partitions. If it bothers you to much you could boot using a Linux distro and format it using that but It might not be worth your time to recover the small amount of space they are occupying.
Yeah I did that once in Ubuntu, it was strange though, it said that it did it but then over the next half only then did the stuff slowly delete off of the drive when ever I refreshed the window.
How exaclty are you supposed to go buy doing it on Ubuntu?
your best bet would probably be to use gparted
http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Hard-Drive-Partition-Using-Gparted I'm fairly cretin that if it isn't already bundled with ubuntu that it should be in the software catalog ( the App-store thingy built into ubuntu so should be easy to install)
http://www.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Hard-Drive-Partition-Using-Gparted
then you would start from step 6 in the above.
Again this would be the type of thing to do with only that one drive plugged in as to avoid accidents.
Thanks :) i'll do that tomorrow and get back to you :)
And just quickly back to the windows re-installation, is there no point in partitioning windows on C?
I wouldn't I would just let it use the entire disk.
I look forward to hearing all about it ! Good Luck
I just did it then and it worked perfectly! :D (couldn't wait till tomorrow haha).
it's still un-allocated but i'll allocate it after the re-install.
I may as well tell you my plans for my PC this year that may cause problems with windows.
So first up i'm getting a bigger case, and then after that I will be getting a 256GB SSD which I will clone my newly installed Win7 from my 64GB SSD to. After that I will be getting a new motherboard and then eventually a new CPU. What I was wondering is what problems could I run into when chnaging my Mobo and CPU, booting and activation wise?
I reinstall Windows every couple of months or weeks (depending on my mood and how much I've used the system, but mostly depending on if it gives me bluescreens).
Things I've found it's useful to have done:
A) relocate C:\Program Files (x86) and, if possible, C:\Program Files to another drive through using mklink /J or mklink /d <- assign this to a batch file you can easily find
B) keep DirectX, PhysX, Visual C++ redist et cetera installers on a flash drive
C) keep installers for all drivers your system may need on that same flash drive, too
D) keep a full registry backup of a fresh install that has all of the basic applications you want to have installed, or alternatively if you're using open source applications mostly, keep a ninite installer on the flash drive I mentioned above
E) back up your C:/Users folder with everything in it - of particular importance here are the "My Documents" and "AppData" folders where the settings for all of your applications are stored
F) Use parted magic (Linux distro for partitioning, uses gparted) or the "repair" option from a Windows install disc. Gparted is significantly easier.
Windows Install disk: Open the command prompt, type in "diskpart" without the quotes and press enter; wait for it to load, then type in "list disk" and press enter; you'll get a list of drives. Find your system drive, then type "select" and the number of your system drive after that, press enter; type clean to remove all partitions from the disk, then type "create partition primary" to create a partition that fills the whole drive; type "select partition 1" and press enter to switch focus to your newly created partition, then type in "format fs=ntfs", press enter and wait for the system to finish formatting the partition. At this stage you're done and can reinstall a clean slate Windows.
Gparted: find your drive in the drive menu, select it, then create a new MS-DOS partition table and create a primary partition that is formatted as NTFS that fills the whole drive, then click the big tick mark in the toolbar to execute; wait for it to finish and you're done.
Diskpart can also be used from within Windows do do some other stuff like assigning a partition to a folder, reassigning drive letters, repartition drives and the like.
More problems than I could list here. First, cloning the Windows install to a different SSD could end up giving you all sorts of weird problems, and then you've got Windows reacting badly to a different chipset than the one it remembers from before. A different CPU shouldn't be a big problem usually, but in this case things would just pile up and Windows wouldn't be half as stable as when you installed it (and it's pretty wonky to start with).
She is going to be imaging it to the same disk.
Oh I am going to be moving the OS to a different SSD though, i'll just be re-installing to the old one first.
Or do you think I should wait until I get my new SSD?
How do you reactivate windows? because I am almost certain that I will need to because eventually every single part will be different.
Well I have used images to move OS installs to different hardware to different HDDs literally thousands of times. I have even used Acronis to move installs to boxes with completely different hardware loadouts and have had had very low failure rates. Acronis has a feature that (we will say ) unloads the drivers from the OS so that you can move the image between different boxes. then install the drivers if the hardware is the same Windows re installs the drivers. That said where I have had the most problems is when moving Windows from an HDD to an SSD. My suggestion would be to make the image because you want to reinstall Windows anyhow then try dropping that image on your new SSD. If it works fantastic if not then you go trough the process of reinstalling Windows ( which you would have had to do any how if you were not imaging ) you don't have anything to lose other than maybe 15 min. Then if you have to make a new image from that.
As far as the reactivation of Windows.. Im sure that Windows will prompt you to reactivate if you need to.