[SOLVED] A little confused about how my drive shows up as in Disk Manager. Please advice.

[Moribund]

OK, this is going to be a bit complex because of some history so bear with me.
I buy a lot of drives for my clients, both for servers (I do IT for some of my travel agency clients as well as residential computer related services). A few years back I started having issues with some Seagate hard drives I purchased. I had to return a bunch of them as they were dead on arrival. So I had a Seagate person mail me a 6 TB hard drive to sort of make up for the crappy drives I've been getting.

I was either the unluckiest person alive or... but that drive had some very odd issues. One time it stopped getting recognised by any of my computers, and I eventually narrowed it down to a Seagate-Seagate firmware conflict. Apparently the 6 Tb drive wouldn't work when paired with another model of Seagate drive which I had in all 3 of my machines. So I started only using it in my main desktop paired with a Samsung Evo SSD and a WD 3 TB drive. But that drive was always very odd. Although every conceivable program from Crystal Disk Info to Speedfan would give it flying colours and although it passed the manufacturer's Long Test it would often take a whole minute to spin up. Sometimes whenever I played music from it - the player would stall and then resume again. However - all the tests still came back fine. (Of course I do realise this doesn't exclude possible hardware issues).

Lately it started giving me I/O errors when plugged through a USB 3 enclosure (enclosure seems to work fine with other drives). So I opened it again in Disk manager and lo and behold: - I realised that when I was recently re-installing my Windows 10, I forgot to remove that 6 TB Seagate drive and of course, - it now had a small Microsoft partition in it. I didn't think it could be the reason for its issues, but I decided to use the CMD Diskpart to remove that partition and extend the much larger partition over it. So I did that.

However, - after the intermittent message flashing and then immediately disappearing about it supposedly not having enough space to extend the partition, - now it shows up in Disk Manager with a yellow-brownish or dirty green border and the colour square at the bottom labels it as "simple volume". There are no options to convert it back from simple volume.

What exactly did I do wrong, and what are the implications? I don't have that much experience with Disk Manager, I prefer to use other software and CMD for working with drives.

Grateful for any advice.

Thanks in advance

 

[USAFRet]

I have an issue with Microsoft just "taking over" a physically separate drive you're NOT installing Windows on (and I've done my share of just forgetting I had another drive connected to my machine) but alas, things are the way they are.

Which is why every intelligent tutorial for installing Windows strongly recommends having only one physical drive connected during the process.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Moribund]

Unless you're doing a fresh install on a laptop with an SSD and an HDD and you've never taken anything apart in your life. Particularly the machines which require the removal of a keyboard, or removal of a keyboard followed by removing the screws under it to release the bottom case cover to get to to the SSD/HDD. Suppose I should at least thank Microsoft for giving me extra paid work to supplement the boring "server room blues" ;-))

 

[USAFRet]

Unless you're doing a fresh install on a laptop with an SSD and an HDD and you've never taken anything apart in your life. Particularly the machines which require the removal of a keyboard, or removal of a keyboard followed by removing the screws under it to release the bottom case cover to get to to the SSD/HDD. Suppose I should at least thank Microsoft for giving me extra paid work to supplement the boring "server room blues" ;-))

True.

But in that case, there would be little issue, because the owner wouldn't be taking out 'the other drive'
It would remain until death.

hehe...we see people here that did not even KNOW they had a second drive in the system.

 

[iTRiP]

Which is why every intelligent tutorial for installing Windows strongly recommends having only one physical drive connected during the process.

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

Normally for me once I have achieved 100% single partition for my drives, they remain that way even through a new fresh windows setup, only the drives witch I plan on formatting and repartitioning through the windows install process will be worked on and altered, It's great that it can still be done this way, I would hate to remove or disconnect so many drives every fresh install.

This time though, it wasn't so easy, probably never was before either, might have been because previous times I had brand new disks, and this time it was a used disk.

This last time, and usually only my C:\ had extra partitions automatically created, and that is the one drive that I don't mind having it that way, because I can still simply delete them the next install.