256GB 2.5" Drive, ripped from old Dell Laptop

troublemecca

Reputable
Apr 12, 2015
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4,520
... I recently added this as a second drive in my new rig... it gets recognised just fine, however the old Dell restore partition (10GB) just wont quit... i've tried the disk manager, i've tried diskpart from the command prompt (though my experience is limited to following instructions), but nothing seems to let me re-partition/reformat this stupid drive... I had to go through hoops to change ownership of the windows partition, in order to just delete the (old) system files/folders manually, because that was the only way i could think of to free up space and make it useful

it's had vista, 7, ubuntu on it so far... no troubles previously.... vista was the last one installed
 
Hey there, troublemecca.
It sounds like you've tried quite a few options. You could always try one of the HDD diagnostic tools, which offer Write Zeros (a low level format). This basically writes a "zero/blank" on each sector of your drive on top of any data there is, so be sure to backup everything important before you try that, because your data would become irretrievable. This method should be able to do the trick. Make sure to choose a complete erase if prompted with other options, so that it deletes everything. Note that the process might take awhile to complete.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD