Turning "unallocated space" to a simple volume

[Miss_Malice]

I'm having difficulty changing the majority of my hard drive space to a simple volume, so I have access to it. When I right-click to bring up the menu on the unallocated volume, every menu option is greyed out except for help. I can't make it a simple volume, or striped volume, etc.
As this unallocated space accounts for a majority of my hard drive's space, this needs to be addressed.


Also, as a side question, how do I combine volumes so all my space is available in one place?

 

[drtweak]

A few things.

1) Can we get a screen shot?
2) Do they have a black bar or blue bar? Black is Unallocated Blue is not.
3) Is this an OEM (HP, Dell, etc) PC? They might be system partitions that can not be deleted in disk management but can be in diskpart
4) Depending on how the system is (GPT or MBR) you can only have so many partitions depending on which one. Usually only 4 primary partitions. To have more than 4 the 4th must be a logical partition and then you can make other partitions inside of that.

 

[Miss_Malice]

A few things.

1) Can we get a screen shot?
2) Do they have a black bar or blue bar? Black is Unallocated Blue is not.
3) Is this an OEM (HP, Dell, etc) PC? They might be system partitions that can not be deleted in disk management but can be in diskpart
4) Depending on how the system is (GPT or MBR) you can only have so many partitions depending on which one. Usually only 4 primary partitions. To have more than 4 the 4th must be a logical partition and then you can make other partitions inside of that.

1- I have a screen shot, but when I try to add a picture to the forum, a pop-up shows asking for a url, and I'm not exactly sure what it's asking for.
2- It has a Black bar.
3- My main computer is a Gateway laptop using windows 10 as it's operating system.
4- I'm working on restoring a 500 GB external hard drive that crashed a few years ago and I recently discovered new applications that may be able to salvage it. I've already relocated the data that was on it to a separate hard drive, but now I only have access to 80GB of the space. The rest is unavailable for formatting.

 

[USAFRet]

1. How to post a screencap here
http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-2580030/detailed-instructions-posting-images-tom-hardware.html

 

[Miss_Malice]

http://i63.tinypic.com/x3d8gi.png

As you can see, on diskpart, neither of my external hard drives (Disk 1 and Disk 2) are recognized, and the majority of Disk 2's space is unable to be formatted.

 

[ArtPog]

So what does your system consist of?

Well, you have a 2 TB drive - presumably a HDD - serving as a secondary drive that contains no data. Nothing. Nada.

Then you have a 500 GB drive also serving as a secondary drive that also contains no data. Nothing. Nada.

Finally your "Gateway" boot drive - a 480 (SSD I presume); apparently the sole drive in the system that contains ANY data, including your OS.

Apparently the system seems to boot to the OS without any problems, yes? That being the case what problems are you encountering when attempting to create and format partitions on those empty secondary drives? Can we assume you know how to utilize Disk Management to accomplish these tasks?

 

[drtweak]

sounds like you need to run a Clean command in Disk part on those ddrives.

Open up diskpart and then type these

List Disk
Select Disk X (X is the disk number of which you want to wipe clean)
clean

Note: This will WIPE it clean to an uninitilized state and remove all partitions, settings etc on the drive. The 2TB has one 260 GB partition. I don't know if there there is anything you need off of there. If not just do a clean on both the drive, then it will ask to initilize the drives, just do them as MBR which is fine since they are under 2Tb and not being used as a uEFI boot drive.

You should then be able to re-partition them as you please.