Remove System Reserved partition from external drive

mikesilve · 23 Feb 2011

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

theog · 23 Feb 2011

Delete both partitions & reformat.

Partition or Volume - Delete
Partition or Volume - Create New

mikesilve · 23 Feb 2011

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

theog · 23 Feb 2011

theog said:

Delete both partitions & reformat.

Partition or Volume - Delete
Partition or Volume - Create New

You will need to delete both partitions.

Bare Foot Kid · 23 Feb 2011

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.