How do I recover the OEM portion of Hard Drive?

[TreeTops]

I have a old hard drive that has a 10 GB OEM partition and a 288GB partition. The 10 GB partition does not show up with a drive letter. I have formatted the 288 GB partition. I would like to erase the OEM stuff on the 10GB portion and combine it with the 288 partition to make a 298 GB disk. Is there a simple way to do this? Is there a program that can do it?

[aedipuss]

control panel/administrative tools/computer management/disk management - right click on the small partition and erase it. right click on the other partition and erase it. right click on the drive and make a new partition out of the whole drive. format.

[hech54]

Control Panel
Admin. Tools
Computer Management
Disc Management

dammit...too slow...

[TreeTops]

Nope. That didn't work. Rt mouse only gets a help window.

[hech54]

Nope. That didn't work. Rt mouse only gets a help window

Yep. Both of us are wrong. Time to buy some software I guess.

[NoBuddy]

Before spending money: try the free version of Partition Wizard Home Edition 7.0.
I use it a lot, works fine even with W7 partitions.

[oldfart13]

Didn't make the partition active did you? I think that's in the admin tools. Had a similar problem making flash ram in my Kobo ereader show up in Win 7. Had to make the drive active and then assign a letter. Then it shows up. Yeah, Partition Magic, Acronis Disc Director, etc. all good for making active partitions or resizing drives...

[jman98]

Here's an ugly, brute force method that would work, although I do not necessarily suggest it instead of other methods but if you've got the time it will work.

Download Ubuntu Linux. Disconnect Disk 0 from the PC so you are sure you are not using it. Boot Ubuntu and let it find Disk 1 and have it format the entire disk drive during a simple installation. When installation is finished you'll have one large Linux partition on Disk 1. Shutdown the PC, reconnect Disk 0 and boot from it. Then use Windows to format Disk 1.

If you have Unix/Linux skills and no what you are doing, you could boot some sort of live distribution such as the Trinity Rescue Kit and possibly via fdisk get a brand new partition created that encompasses all of Disk 1 or you could use dd to basically overwrite everything on Disk 1 with /dev/zero as in input argument and render it unusable and you'd be forced to format the entire thing under Windows to get to it.

[aedipuss]

did you right click on the drive where it's listed down in the bottom window? try deleting both volumes.

[TreeTops]

Yes, I did. Right clicking on the partition that doesn't have a drive letter (the OEM 10GB) just gets a help window.

And jman98, I have puppy linux on a CD. Can I use that?

[ranchhand]

Treetops, you can shrink and expand volumes easily in Windows 7, it works great. Use it all the time. Just expand the volume partition to include the smaller one and you are done in about 5 seconds. W7 auto-formats to NTFS. I am assuming you are running Windows 7.

[deadrats]

you could just boot from a windows cd and assuming that there wasn't anything you wanted on the 288gb partition, delete the 10gb partition, delete the 288gb partition, then create a single presumably 300gb partition and format that, no need for linux, should take all of 5 minutes.

[TreeTops]

Deadrats, I can not get to the 10Gig partition. It has no drive letter. It must be a hidden partition created by OEM where they install their utilities and back up stuff.

Ranchhand..How do I go about expanding the volume partition (the larger one) to include the smaller one when I can't access the smaller one the normal ways.

OldFart..I can't make that partition active as I can not access it.

Doing a search on Google for this problem...Some have posted long and convinced procedures, some dangerous, most really complicated. I may try the program NoBuddy suggested above.

[aedipuss]

go to the website of the drive manufacturer. download their tools. boot their cd and choose to do a low level format. it will wipe the drive.

[TreeTops]

aedipuss, I will do that and report back here.

[jman98]

Yes, I did. Right clicking on the partition that doesn't have a drive letter (the OEM 10GB) just gets a help window.

And jman98, I have puppy linux on a CD. Can I use that?

I'm not familiar with Puppy Linux so all I can say is "probably" to that. There are so many distributions that it's impossible to keep up with them all. If you know what you are doing you might be able to use fdisk under Puppy Linux without attempting an install and remove the existing partitions on the drive. My suggestion is meant to be a last resource kind of thing just if you can't get any other method to work.

[TreeTops]

Success..Thanks to all that responded. aedipuss seemed to have the easiest solution. I went to the WD hard drive web site. Downloaded their recommended software (Acronis True Image WD Edition) and followed the prompts for creating a new disk. That did it. Took all of 10 minutes.

[ranchhand]

If the smaller partition will not show up in Control Panel/Disk Management, it must be corrupted or some special attribute set on it. I think a full drive wipe and a new partition are in order, then. You could try UBCD or OTLPENet, I am pretty sure they would remove all partitions.

[hech54]

Before spending money

I was joking.
I grew up with Dell computers and their extra recovery partitions.
The OP did something wrong....plain and simple.

[SLK001]

I believe that all you had to do was to assign a drive letter to the partition, then you could do whatever you wanted with it.

You can check it yourself if you desire... just go to the Admin Tools\Comp Mgmt\Disk Mgmt, select the last drive of a multi partitioned disk, then right click and select "Change Drive Letters...", then select REMOVE. Once you have done this, that particular partition will not show up in an Explorer window as present.

Just be sure to reverse all of that once you are done playing.