How to Delete Recovery Partition of External Hard Disk on Windows 7
And so this is my first post for the year 2013!
That aside, I’d like to outline how to delete the recovery partition of an external hard disk using Windows 7. First, I would like to give a brief background on how I stumbled upon this problem.
I have a broken Acer laptop with a broken LCD and a malfunctioning hard disk. Before, I used to connect this laptop to my TV so that I could still use it. But once the hard disk started failing, I called it quits and bought a new laptop. Of course I wanted to retrieve my files on that failing HD so what I did was bought a hard drive enclosure (2.5) from CDR King.
So that’s what happened and I was able to retrieve my files using a software called Diskgetor. It is an extremely powerful software albeit with a steep price.
After retrieving my files, I wanted to format this hard disk so that I can use it as an extra USB flash drive. There were 3 partitions on that disk and I had to merge all of them together to use it as a basic disk. That’s where the problem came in and I couldn’t delete the recovery partition.
Here’s what I did to solve this:
- Delete the other 2 partitions using Disk Management. There will still be 2 partitions, the recovery and the ones we just deleted.
- Go to the command prompt and type in ‘diskpart’ and press Enter to open that utility
- Type in ‘list disk’ and press enter to list down your disks
- Select the disk in question by typing ‘select disk [the number of the disk]’ and press Enter
- Type in ‘details disk’ to get information about the selected disk
- Now, type in ‘select volume [number of the volume of the recovery partition]’ and press Enter
- Once the correct volume/partition is selected, type in ‘delete partition noerr override’ and press Enter. The recovery partition should now be gone…at least the description of it. If you go back to Disk Management in Windows, the partition is still there. Here’s what we do next.
- In Disk Management, create a new volume for the partition of the formerly recovery partition.
- Delete the other partition (not the former recovery partition).
- Extend the volume of the former recovery partition and you get just 1 partition and the disk can now be used as a USB flash disk.
The instructions here might be confusing or doesn’t include a lot of details. But I wrote this to remind how to do this in the future and this outline is enough for me to remember the details. But if you need help on this matter, simply leave a comment below and I will return to you as soon as possible.
Here are some links that helped me in the process:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755238.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCZNsJ7QaKQ
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/300415
