Dealing With Hard Drive Partitions-Help Appreciated

[appophylite]

While I was at work, a colleague asked if I would loan him my portable hard drive. It seems he wanted to borrow the case so that he could take the physical drive out of the enclosure and replace it with one he salvaged from an older laptop of his. When he finished what he was doing, he told me I could keep his drive as well since he no longer had a use for it and his was a 120 GB compared to my original 40 GB.

When I got home and plugged it into my computer, it turned out his drive was partitioned into 2 60 GB partitions (both partitions were cleaned of all existing data so all available space was present). Wanting to merge the partitions, I looked around a bit online and found info that said that if I went to Control Panel-Administrative Tools-Computer Management-Disk Management, I should be able to see both partitions and be able to merge them into one. I selected the second partition and the option to merge the partitions. Now when I plug in the external hard drive, it only shows up as one drive (no partition), but still only appears as a 60 GB drive when it should appear as a 120 GB drive instead.

Does anyone know what I did wrong, and how I can fix it/resolve it to make the drive show the 120 GB that are actually present?

 

[craiglester]

if it's blank already.. then I'd try to delete the volume, then create it again using all the free space. that's should do it I'd imagine.

 

[obobskivich]

try using a disk utility program aside from what Windows includes, like PartitionMagic or Acronis

 

[Xanatos]

try a quick format.

 

[Zodduska]

Go into disk management, delete all volumes on the drive then format the free space.

 

[appophylite]

Sweet! Deleting the volumes helped bring up the size of the HDD to appx 106 GB. Now, when I plug it into the computer and access it through Disk Management, I see two partitions, a 106 GB partition that I can access for storage, etc and a second hidden partition labeled PQService that is approximately 5 GB in size and doesn't seem to want to disappear. Anyone have any thoughts on that one? I looked it up online and it would appear that its typically a partition that is created and hidden from which the computer can 'recover' itself if one has recovery tools. Is there a way to dispose of this partition through Windows XP on this external drive, cause I really don't need it and it doesn't seem like I'm googling the right thing cause I can't find info on this...

Thanks again to everyone who helped me get this far!

 

[fordgtlover]

Here's an article explaining one option.

Access To The Hidden Partition Pqservice

If it was me I would:
- create a dos boot disk and put the fdisk utility on it.
- install the 120GB drive as the master disk (and disconnect all others)
- boot to the dos boot disk and run fdisk and delete all partitions
- put the disks back in their original configuration
- use the XP disk management tool to initialise the drive and create a new partition