Question unallocated hd space

Oct 1, 2022
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I recently upgraded the drive in a dell laptop. I put the drive in an external case and disk management showed 6 partitions on the drive, I deleted 3 of them and now I show 2 unallocated spaces that I can't seem to make a part of the primary partition. The drive shows 697mb and I thought it was a 750mb drive {I would attribute the missing mb to formatting etc} What are the two 500mb spaces shown in disk management?
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I recently upgraded the drive in a dell laptop. I put the drive in an external case and disk management showed 6 partitions on the drive, I deleted 3 of them and now I show 2 unallocated spaces that I can't seem to make a part of the primary partition. The drive shows 697mb and I thought it was a 750mb drive {I would attribute the missing mb to formatting etc} What are the two 500mb spaces shown in disk management?
Please show us a screencap of your Disk Management window.

Upload your pic to imgur.com, post the link here
 
I'm going to guess the original hard drive was the system drive. This would've consisted of at least the main OS partition, the boot loader partition, the recovery environment partition, and the factory reset partition.

If you have no need for the data on the drive, you should delete everything. It'd be much easier than trying to wrangle with what you have now.
 
Oct 1, 2022
6
0
10
I'm going to guess the original hard drive was the system drive. This would've consisted of at least the main OS partition, the boot loader partition, the recovery environment partition, and the factory reset partition.

If you have no need for the data on the drive, you should delete everything. It'd be much easier than trying to wrangle with what you have now.
I formatted the drive then went to "{diskpart" and saw all of the partitions, I deleted the unnecessary partitions but cannot make the primary extend to absorb these two spaces. I went into disk mgmt and it shows 2 500mb spaces as unallocated
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
I formatted the drive then went to "{diskpart" and saw all of the partitions, I deleted the unnecessary partitions but cannot make the primary extend to absorb these two spaces. I went into disk mgmt and it shows 2 500mb spaces as unallocated
We out here can't really suggest a path forward, until we can see the same thing you do.

Screencap, please.
 
I formatted the drive then went to "{diskpart" and saw all of the partitions, I deleted the unnecessary partitions but cannot make the primary extend to absorb these two spaces. I went into disk mgmt and it shows 2 500mb spaces as unallocated

Need a pic of Disk Management.

Disk Management won't allow partition extension in some circumstances.

We don't know your circumstances because we haven't seen the pic.
 
You need to use a third party tool to add that unallocated to the partition at the end of the drive. If the unallocated was to the right of that partition, you could use Disk Management.

Minitool Partition Wizard will do it.

Or just delete all partitions if you don't care about the contents.
 
Thank You, I won't worry about it I just didn't understand why it wouldn't extend to those spaces. I will look for the Minitool software
You can't extend a partition in reverse because there are special parts of the file system that are essentially unmovable and data tends to be addressed via a relative point. That is, the starting point of that partition may be 1000 physically, but the file system sees it as position 0. You can extend to the right because it doesn't affect where the unmovable areas are as fare as the file system is concerned.

But if you don't need anything on that drive, again as I've been saying, delete all the partitions. You'll have the contiguous space you need to make one partition to cover the whole thing