Windows 7: Remove System Reserved partition from external drive

Hi

I've taken a 1TB SATA HDD from a second computer which had Windows 7 OS on it. I have housed it in an external caddy to use as a backup drive for my primary computer. It comes up as two paritions G and H. I've formatted G to give me a 931Gb drive and I have a H drive with 99.9MB which is the System Reserved from the previous Windows 7 install.



Can I format the System Reserved partition on the external drive and combine the two partitions to create one external backup HDD?? If I need software tools to do this are there any freeware tools that would do this?

Thanks
Mike

Delete both partitions & reformat.

Partition or Volume - Delete
Partition or Volume - Create New

Thanks Theog.

Deleted the System Reserved partition - now Unallocated. Tried to extend the G partition to take up the unallocated space and get error "The operation is not supported by the object". Not a problem if it's not possible but just curious. Mike

You will need to delete both partitions.

Hello mikesilve, welcome to Seven Forums!


If you really want the best possible space to use as storage then you need to do a wipe (secure erase) to the entire HDD first, then create the needed partitions and it can be done while Windows is running, have a look at the clean all command listed in step #7 of this tutorial at the link below.

Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

   Note

Contrary to popular belief, doing a format with Windows 7 does not remove any data at all, it just checks for sector errors and marks the space to be over-written as needed, all the data is still there including all the code from previous/failed installation attempts.