Hard drive partition can't be formatted, 142GB held hostage.

I don't know when this happened. I bought my laptop a few years ago with 320 GB worth of space. I got a message a few days ago that I had run out of room on my computer and when i went to look in Administrative tools, I saw that there were now 4 partitions on my hard drive. One is my main 142GB C drive which is formatted as NTFS. Another one is a 13GB recovery partition. The other two are just listed as Healthy OEM Partitions and are unlettered and I cant seem to format them so basically half my hard drive space is sitting unused and unusable. Is there a way for me to format them for use? I tried booting the computer up as an Administrator but I couldn't format the partitions then either. When I right-click to format, the only option I get is 'Help' which is no hep at all. If anyone can help me that wold be awesome. Thanks

I suspect all 4 of those partitions have been there all the time.

For reasons known only to Acer, they seem to split up most of the drive into 2 partitions--142.54 GB and 139 GB in your case.

The 139 GB partition is apparently empty. I assume you save all of your files on the C drive.

I'd just delete the 139 GB partition, which would convert it into "unallocated space", and then "extend" C into that unallocated space. You would then be left with 3 partitions:

C of about 281 GB
13 GB recovery partition
3.54 OEM partition; not sure what this is; maybe tools of some kind.


You should be able to delete the 139 GB partition in Disk Management.

Confirm that you have not stored any data on that partition before you delete it. Your Disk Management picture says it is empty.

How would I delete it? Disk management does not give me that option when I click on it.

Highlight it and right click it.

What do you then see as menu options?

You may have to first give it a drive letter?

Below is what I see in Disk Management when I right click my E partition.

This is the only option I get when I right click on it.

I'm not sure what is going on if all you see is "help".

Go to the "action" menu at the top of Disk Management and choose "refresh", "rescan", or both.

Then go to "all tasks" on the action menu. Do you then see any other choices?

If not, you may want to download Partition Wizard to see if it can do what you need.

You may have better luck if you boot into safe mode and then look at Disk Management.

Or you may be able to delete it in Diskpart.

Acer is cuckoo, no doubt about it.

What is Diskpart and where do I download it? Also which version of Partition Wizard should I download? EaseUS or Minitool?

Partition Wizard is a downloadable third party app.

Diskpart is included in Windows and is accessible from an administrator's command prompt.

Open an administrator's command prompt and enter these commands:

diskpart

list disk

You will probably see only 1 disk listed, probably disk 0.

If that's the case enter these commands:

select disk 0

list part

Then post a picture of what you see.

Regarding Partition Wizard, download the "bootable disk" version and be prepared to burn it to a disk. EaseUS is an unrelated company; not sure where you are seeing that.