Using old hard drive as an external

Question

I'm using my old hard drive in an USB hard drive enclosure. When I connect it to my laptop it has two drives on it can I make it only have one. It won't safely remove is this because it has 2 drives on it. What can I do if anything. Thank you

Answer 1

No you can not join the USB Drive with the Physcial Laptop drive, it's easier just to have two drives anyway, at least you know what data is going in.

If your USB Hard Drive has two drives, it is partitioned. You can join these partitions but it is safe if there is nothing on the drive before doing this just in case any data does get lost.

To join the partitions you can do the following:

Click start and type in: Disk Management a program called: Create and format hard disk partitions will show up

You will see a diagram of drives at the bottom part of the window, locate to what will look like your drive.

It will have two blocks, what you will need to do is select one block and right click it, you will need to "Delete the volume.." and then select the next block and right click and "Extend Volume..".

A wizard will open up showing you any partitions you can join, add the partition and click next. The partitions will be joined and will only be listed as one drive.

Sorry if it may seem confusing

Answer 2

It has two partitions, representing two logical drives (as opposed to physical drives). You need to repartition the hard drive so that it only has one partition. You can do this in windows by right-clicking on your My Computer icon and choosing "Manage". Then look for "Disk Management" in left side of the window that opens. This tool will allow you to re-partition and reformat the disk.

You could also get a partition resizing tool, but if you have the space to (temporarily) copy everything off of your drive I'd just do that and start over.

Answer 3

The easiest way I've found to merge two logical drives (or two partitions) back into one is to use the GParted tool.

Answer 4

from what it sounds like, the manufacturer of the laptop created whats called a recovery partition on your original(or old) hard drive. so though you only have 1 physical hard drive, it has been split into 2 sections, which are called partitions.

if this is true. the recovery partition is what you want to get rid of because it does not store any of your personal data, just data that you would need to reformat the hard drive without the operating system disk.

one way you can tell if the second partition is for recovery is that they are usually about 1 to 10 GBs in size.

to fix this issue i would right click my computer>manage>>disk management

and from there, at the bottom of the window, your drive will show up as 1 hard drive spilt into 2 partitions. which you will need to delete the "recovery" partition.

if you want do use that space you can use a tool called partition magic to tack the rest of that hard drive space onto the partition that you already have.

*WARNING* check the what is inside the partitions before you delete one!!! whatever you delete costs a lot to recover so make sure you don't need it!!!