Set hard drive to only one partition using entire drive

[trevil620]

I have a WD 320GB drive that currently thinks it's 290GB (1 partition) I want to create ONE partition that gives me maximum space. Originally the drive was formatted by Vista as a main partition (298GB) + a recovery partition (+8GB). Tried Disk Manager, but unable to get over 302GB. Unable to find a direct answer on internet.
Thank you & Merry Christmas!!

 

[drtweak]

Ok well 1) have to remember HDD makers see 1,000,000 bytes to a Megabyte were as the PC see's 1,048,576 bytes to a megabyte so always expect to lose on average 10% from what you bought to what the PC will say you have.

Now 1) I would NOT delete the recovery partition unless you reinstall with like windows or something because if your Vista fails or crashes for what ever reason and you DON"T have any recovery DVD's your screwed pretty much. Got to find a Vista disk that will work with you PC which OEM Disk will NOT work with Retail disk (Ones you buy in the store) when putting in the Vista Key thats on your PC.

2) If you REALLY want to get rid of it and you Really want to get that 8GB back because of space just get a new hard drive and clone it to the new hard drive which copies everything over and you have a bigger hard drive to work with.

I have a 320 Gig with me and the bigger partition i can make is 298GB. So if you got it to 302 thats as big as you will get. If you want bigger get a new hard drive.

 

[trevil620]

Thank you for your response. The drive is to be used only as a 1-time backup for Acronis It is an old drive I had laying around and wanted to use. I have a 1TB that is my "real" drive, and am using ~318GB. I plugged in the 320 as a slave, deleted the partitions using Disk Manager, (saw that the sum of the two was > 305GB) then couldn't see the drive (my bad). Made it the master, used the recovery disks to format. At one point I saw that I could "grow" the main partition to take up the deleted partition, but it was less than the # I saw before. Really, all I want to do is just get the max available space so I can use Acronis to make a bootable image. Yes, I know that I will need to trim some fat off my live drive to make sure it fits. As a side issue, do you know if Acronis is smart enough to analyze space before starting, or do you think it will chug for hours then see not enough space and crap out? Thanks again!

 

[drtweak]

No they won't start if there isn't enough room.

If its just a backup then yea just trim the fat and try to image it. usually with those programs you don't need to remove any paritions. If you clone the hard drive it just deletes everything on the drive anyways. Just don't really use that drive as an everyday drive lol. Once the OS partition gets 80% or more full they tend to be slow as a snail

 

[trevil620]

Thank you very much for your suggestions! I just decided to get a new (larger) drive to use for making the recovery image (Santa asked what I wanted...)