Thinkpads Forum

Evenin' all:

I have a 320Gb SATA drive from an old T61 onto which I installed Win 7 from a set of Lenovo recovery CDs (from a T430). The T61 is long gone but I would like to use the drive for data storage. Only problem is, 100Mb of the drive is taken up by something that I cannot delete (it's in a non-identified partition that doesn't show up under disk management or Diskpart).

Any ideas how I can delete this data?

Thanks

Running DBAN, or similar, should destroy all data and partitions on the disk.

Any free partition manager, like Easeus or Aomei will enable you to delete the hidden partition and create one large one.

100 MB seem like the Windows 7 recovery partition. DBAN will nuke the boot sector for you and all partitions with it.

That 100MB is not the recovery partition (which is ca 4-5GB), but it contains the boot manager (for Vista and W7, possibly W8) and other boot info.
It cannot be deleted (if you do, Windows wouldn't start any more), but you can avoid creating such a partition, if you first pre-format your HD and then install Windows after that.
That way Windows would put all the booting info in the C-drive (or whichever will be your root-drive).
One shouldn't worry about 100MB nowadays.

Thanks RBS. That's what I thought (its small for a complete recovery partition). Unfortunately, I have been unable to format it away, or remove it by any other standard Windows OS utility. I'm using the drive as a data-only drive in a USB drive case, so don't need windows on it.

Plug it in your USB port.
If there's anything important on it, save it first.
Then click on Start and type in: diskmgmt.msc
It will show you all drives and partitions incl. the external drive.
Main drive is Disk 0, external probably Disk 1 (or Disk 2 if you already have 2 drives in the laptop).
Now go to your external disk (Disk 1 or 2) and successively rightclick all partitions, and select delete.
When they are all deleted, rightclick the now empty space and select (Quick)Format.
Exit Diskmgmt.
That's it.

Or, use DISKPART with the CLEAN command. It will clear all info and you can then re-initialize the HDD and create new partitions.