Repartitioning Second Hard Drive 2

[Meari]

Hi all...

I installed a second hard drive on my new Dell Dimension 4600. The OS is XP Pro. I formatted the second hard drive and it's recognized by the OS. Somewhere along the line, I must've missed a step because I wanted to partition the the second hard drive. Is there a way to repartition the second hard drive (no data is on it) without having to purchase software such as Partition Magic? I'm a novice, so please keep it simple... Thanks!

 

[kutz13]

If you've got no data on it why not just go into disk management and delete the partition and start again? 10 minutes and done, it'll probably take you longer than that to find an alternative way!

 

[kutz13]

Sorry Meari that didn't sound very helpful - I'll start again. Right click once on your 'My Computer' icon and choose 'Manage' from the context menu that appears. Click on 'Disk Management' and you'll be faced with a listing of your installed HDD's, Disk 0 is more than likely your first drive and will be labelled something like (C**GB Healthy (System). Your second HDD will probably be disk 1 and will appear underneath disk 0, to remove the existing partition on the second disk (disk 1) just right click and choose 'Delete Partition' and accept the prompts. To create a partition just RH click and choose that option, tell it in the following dialogues how big you want the partition(s) to be. When finished RH click on the partitions and choose 'Format' and follow the dialogues.

 

[Meari]

Thanks kutz13. I tried going back into Disk Management (thinking it was the way to go), but the computer got "stuck"/"hung up" when I clicked Disk Management and didn't show the drives available. So, I thought I was doing something wrong.

 

[Meari]

OK - I managed to get Disk Management to work and saw the drives listed as kutz13 indicated. When I right click on the second drive, I don't get a choice to 'Delete Partition'... Instead what I have is 'Delete Volume'. What now??

 

[kutz13]

OK, if it says 'Delete Volume' you more than likely have the second disk (Disk 1) set up as a 'Dynamic Disk'. You can confirm this by the label under the Disk 1 on the left of the drive graphic. Dynamic disks call their partitions 'Volumes' instead of 'Partitions'; with dynamic disks you also have the option to create a volume (say 50GB on a 120GB drive), leaving the rest as unallocated space. In the future should 50GB not be enough, you can add more of the unallocated space to the volume. This may be useful if you use multiple HDD's with only one volume (RAID?). If this is unnecessary you can convert the Dynamic disk back to a Basic disk (volumes back to partitions)by RH clicking on the left label and choosing 'Convert to Basic disk', however you will lose any data on this volume (and by extension break any volume across multiple HDD's). If you've got no data there, no problem. Hope this helps you.