Can't combine partitions WD My Book 4tb

[dmeece75]

Hello everyone. I have a 4tb WD My Book external. Was trying to build a recovery boot thumb drive for my Xbox One. Accidentally formatted the WD to 32gb. Lost everything, but that is okay. However, the drive now has two partitions. One is roughly 2.2 tb and the other 1.7tb. I can only format the first (larger) partition and do nothing with the 2nd. The option to extend the first volume never comes up, no matter what I do. Anyone have any advice for combining these two partitions together? Thank you very much.

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there dmeece75,

That is unpleasant. 🙁

You need to back up all the data stored on the drive. After that, you can go to Disk Management, right click on the already existing partition and delete it. Then you can right click on the HDD, and convert it to GPT. After that, you can partition and format the drive.

Currently, I believe the drive is initialized as MBR. This sets a limitation to 2.2TB.

Apart from all this, you could have run some partition/data recovery tool, after you formatted the drive the first time. Most probably, you would have been able to recover at least some of the data.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD