Unpartioning secondary hard drive? (without additional software purchase!) (1 Viewer)

[Stephen Orr]

Oh wise ones. You guys have answered other questions for me, and have save me time and money. Here's another one for you.

I have a second 40GB hard drive in addition to the one my XP operating system is on. When I first bought my second hard drive, I partitioned it into 5 smaller drives. However, these partitions are too small to use as temp storage for the video projects I'm putting together, which sometimes run 8GB or higher. I would like to eliminate at least three of the partitions I have in place. If I must, I can get rid of all of them, but I would prefer not to.

I'm not hip on all the built in features that Windows provides, but someone at work suggested using Fdisk to do the job. Can anyone here give me some advice on how to go about it, or have a better suggestion? Thanks in advance.

 

[Chris]

There is a freeware program called "Slate" (there is also slate pro) which will wipe the MBR records clean off a hard drive and make it completely "unpartitioned" as you desire.

If you're in XP, then you have a much simpler option. Go to Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Disk Management, and right click on each partition you want to go away and say "delete" the partion will be gone.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

I would think the best option is to use the method Chris describes in his second paragraph.

One small issue though - if you're creating new partitions with this, bear in mind that XP cannot create a partition bigger then 32Gb unless you use the NTFS file system.

 

[Stephen Orr]

Thanks for the advice. Last night I transferred everything to my primary disk, then unpartitioned and reformatted the slave to NTFS. That gives me about 38GB to use for my DV editing and storage.....

Man, remember when we thought 40MB was a huge hard drive?