I have a 256GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD which used to have my Windows installation on my desktop PC. Apparently there are two partitions on it.
I would like to start using it as an ordinary external disk for my laptop.
What steps should I take to delete everything on it?
Attach your 256GB SSD internally to your desktop as a Secondary drive. Or attach it via a USB Adapter,Dock or Enclosure
When you boot from the current C: drive, the Secondary SSD will show in This PC.
Press the Windows key +X anc choose Disk Management. Here, in the lower pane, select the 2556GB SSD and right click each partition and Delete them. Now right click in the Unallocated Space and choose to make a new Simple Volume, Partition it and Format it
Thank you for the guidance.
Now I have a 213 GB Healthy, Active Primary partition, 462 MB Healthy Recovery, 450 MB Healthy Recovery and 23,85 GB Unallocated.
Windows will not let me expand the 213 GB. Is there another way to maximize the disk space?
EDIT: After some research I managed to do it using diskpart. One thing that remains is whether there is anything else that I could do to optimize the newly formatted SSD.
Last edited by Fortitude; 14 Jun 2019 at 04:18.
Per spunk's instructions you should have right-clicked and deleted ALL partitions, so that the ENTIRE drive is shown as "unallocated space". There shouldn't have been anything left over from an earlier Windows installation.
If you in fact did exactly that, then something is highly peculiar if you have 2 recovery partitions.
Farrelart is correct. I used to have Windows installed on that disk. The two partitions must have been created by Windows in the past. I couldn't delete them directly from Disk Management because there was no such option.
However, using Diskpart on the command line I did manage to delete them. I then used Disk Management and expanded the available space on the disk to the maximum possible.
You could have used the Clean command in Diskpart as well. If you have deleted ALL partitions or ran the Clean command, the drive will show as Unallocated Space in Disk Management. There is no need to Expand the drive, because it is already at maximum as there are no partitions created yet. If you right click the Unallocated Space and choose to make a Simple Volume, then you would create a partition that is the maximum of the drives capacity.
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