Disk Management Issue -- Again

I had this issue once before and was helped, but I honestly can't remember how I was helped, and between Sevenforums, Eightforums, and Tenforums, I cannot find my old thread. So, with that in mind, here is the problem I'm having:



The 4TB drive (see the black, unallocated chunks) is showing one GPT protected partition (which cannot be deleted) and two RAW partitions which cannot seem to be consolidated. I need to make the entire drive one partition so it can be used as a backup drive for a hotswap bay. This came out of a Seagate external HDD enclosure, and the drive was originally formatted FAT32, and the enclosure utilized a PCB to make the entire drive accessible (probably for mac compatibility). Anyway... I don't remember how I converted the last drive, and really wish I had documented it. Help??

Hydranix said:

Open cmd.exe as administrator.

Run these commands EXACTLY or risk huge data loss.

Code:

diskpart
sel dis 3
cle
conv gpt
cre par pri
format fs=ntfs quick
ass letter=S
exit
exit

"ass letter=S" change that S to whatever drive letter you desire if you so choose

Bonus points for the command line info; it's my preferred method of doing things. Thank you!

PS: Bookmarked.

Hydranix said:

@spapakons I started writing this post for that very reason, but fell asleep before finishing it last nght :)
@kbronski and @the random google searcher that lands here:


Full commands and brief explanation.

Open cmd.exe as administrator.

Run diskpart.exe to do unrestricted disk and partition management

Code:

diskpart

Select the disk you intend to modify. The number (3 in this case) directly relates to number shown in the Disk Management GUI. You DO NOT want to select the wrong disk and issue the clean command. Otherwise you will need third party recovery software.

Code:

select disk 3

Permanently (still recoverable in emergency) remove all partitions from the disk.

Code:

clean

Convert the disks partition table to the modern GPT format. Allows more partitions, and has protection against corruption. (also required to boot Windows

Code:

convert gpt

Create a single "primary" (primary/logical is irrelevant to GPT disks, but Windows still uses this term in this program) partition, spanning the entire disk.

Code:

create partition primary

The newly created partition is automatically selected, so you can issue the format command to write a filesystem to it. The filesystem in this case is NTFS, and the option quick means that instead if erasing the partition, it just writes an empty filesystem to it. It will behave like an erased disk, but old data is still recoverable until you write enough data to the disk to cover the old data. Only omit the quick option if security is a concern, or if the disk behaves strangely. (I've had Windows 7 install not accept a non-zeroed disk a couple times. Irrelevant with modern operating systems.)

Code:

format fs=ntfs quick

Now we assign a drive letter to the disk. This will mount the filesystem and allow you to access and store files on the partition.

Code:

assign letter=S

Now we're done, we issue the exit command first to exit diskpart, and a second time to close the CMD prompt. You can also just closer the window at this point. Does the same thing.

Code:

exit
exit

Yes, I gathered all of that by reading the initial code you had posted. Thanks, though.