How to format hard disk with recovery partition?

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iCeQubeTomato

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May 20, 2010
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I have just swaped my 5400rpm hdd with a SSD on my laptop, now I would like to make the hdd into an external. The problem is there is a recovery partition which I can't format and merge with other partitions. Please help

P/s using windows 7
 
Solution
though its too late ,
I also had the same issue.
So start
1. diskpart
2. list disk
3. select disk 0/1/2... be sure to select the correct disk else u will end up wiping out the wrong volume.
4. clean (thats all )
now in disk management u can a single drive unallocated , proceed as usual from there.
Why not just delete the recovery partition along with the others then create new partitions from scratch?

Being that recovery partitions are usually the first partition on the disk, it might not be possible to merge the partitions. Usually you can only merge the adjacent partition that immediately follows the partition you will be merging to.
 

iCeQubeTomato

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Hi I cant do anything with the recovery partition. When I right clicked on it in Disk Management, the menu only has 'help' option.

If I could delete and format the partition I can then merge the whole disk no?
 

iCeQubeTomato

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I should also mention that there is a 100mb of unallocated space in between the recovery partitions and a ntfs partition. Is there no software that can erase the recovery partition?
 

anfred2

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I have kind of same problem on my disk. Here is how I fixed it.

1, if you want to format the disk, try disk management and right click to go to : format
2, if you want to redistribute the unallocated space, you may try several partition resize software
3, if you want to restore data from the formatted partition, you need to use format recovery software
 

hellosks7

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May 27, 2013
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though its too late ,
I also had the same issue.
So start
1. diskpart
2. list disk
3. select disk 0/1/2... be sure to select the correct disk else u will end up wiping out the wrong volume.
4. clean (thats all )
now in disk management u can a single drive unallocated , proceed as usual from there.
 
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silveralien81

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Oct 9, 2011
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I had exactly the same issue and hellosks7's steps here are exactly step by step what I needed to do. Took about 3 seconds. I am also using Windows 8. So it works for that too. This person is my hero today. :love:
 
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BigMikeNanaimo

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Jun 8, 2013
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I have two solutions that work great, but you need a disk to do it.

Plan A. - Boot with a Hiren's Boot CD and boot to Mini XP. While there you can go into the disk management and easily delete that partition that Win7 won't.

Plan B. - Find a Windows XP disk. As long as you can boot from that you can go thru the setup part as if you were going to setup XP on your machine. When you get to the part where you can choose where to install, that's when you can easily delete that recovery partition.

I hope that helps someone out there.
 

Steve Young

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Aug 4, 2013
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THIS IS THE ANSWER! Thanks for the help - super easy and did the trick.
 
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