See and delete hidden partition on *external* HD?

Hi,

After upgrading laptops, I took my old Lenovo drive, put it in a usb drive enclosure, and now use it as an external drive.

Problem is, it still has the old hidden partition, and as it's only a 60GB drive, I'd love to recover the extra 7GB of space. Disk Management (I'm using XP) doesn't see the hidden partition, so I can't delete it and recover the space.

Is there an easy way to see the partition, delete it, and repartition the drive to use all of its 60GB?

All of the guides on this site seem to be for primary hard drives, and those solutions therefore don't seem to apply. I'd love an easy solution.

Thanks!

 

Check out GParted (free)

 

Doesn't it need to be run externally? Will it recognize the usb drive?

 

Yes it needs to be run externally.

I think GParted detects USB devices as the controllers are initiated when GParted loads. And GParted Live USB is also available, so it should be able to detect other USB devices as well. I have never used it for external HDDs and drives.

It is worth a try. Check out its documentation. You can merge the hidden partition easily, if it is visible.

 

for some reason Gparted didn't work for me. I tried partitioning my x200 a couple days ago... but there was an error and wouldn't let me resize my partition...

 

Well, it looks like I'm basically a moron.

Gparted did indeed see the usb drive, but it still didn't show what I thought was a hidden partition. Snooping some more, turns out I just never knew that HD gigabytes are measured as 1000000000 bytes, not true gigabytes (1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes).

That, plus, I assume, some space for the formatting and file structure, must account for the 7 missing GB in a 60GB drive.???

 

A 60GB drive would give you about 55.8GB of usable space. The rest, don't bother about it.

 

If, after formatting, it's showing 52.54GB usable, do I still have a problem somewhere, then?

 

Does GParted show the same ^ ? What filesystem - NTFS ?
If the 3GB bothers you, you could delete all the partitions, make a single new NTFS partition and install the OS on it, and see how much is usable.

(My math could be wrong)

 

No, your math is right. GParted showed, I believe, 53.8 with NTFS. I'm going to give it one more shot but then I'll probably decide that I probably shouldn't obsess over a few GB. I just hate it when I can't figure things out.

Thanks again for your help, by the way. GParted's a nice program.

 

Yeah, with GParted it says that the capacity is 52.54, but that there are 53.8 available for the primary partition.

???

 

You could always try slax or knoppix, although those have gparted included as well, just a suggestion.