Help with a hard drive please!?!?!

[wayne101]

Hello,
I have an 80GB hard drive that was originally designated as a laptop drive. I can't remember exactly which laptop it came from, but I think it was an Acer with Windows 7 Basic installed. It could've been Vista....I don't remember.

I removed and replaced it, and have since put it into an USB enclosure. It has 2 partitions, one I can transfer files to, format or whatever. The other is a locked and healthy "recovery partition" of more than 12GB. I would like to recover that space as it isn't needed. I cannot access the partition in Windows 7 by using the usual right click on Computer and going to Manage, disk management, storage etc. When I right click on the partition, I only have "help" as an option.

How do I delete the "recovery partition" so I can reformat the entire hard drive and restore it to it's original configuration?

Again, it's currently an external USB drive and NOT installed as a primary or secondary drive.

Thanks is advance for any and all help regarding this matter.

 

[zigzag3143]

Any third party partition manager (like Parigon disk suite_free trial) will do this easily.

 

[Qdos]

Just hook the drive up to an internal PC port and use Windows Disk Management, and Diskpart, or a third party formatting utility to wipe it and turn it into a single partition device.

It's easier to do this when it's not going through a USB interface as the drive can be seen at boot time.

 

[writhziden]

Use Unhide the Recovery Partition on a Basic Disk with DiskPart to unhide the partition. Then you can use Disk Management to delete the recovery partition and extend the partition you are already using.