Partition has no drive letter (Full Version)

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User169 -> Partition has no drive letter (12/22/2006 17:20:10)

Hi, I have a brand new 160 GB hard drive that was installed as the slave drive. After formatting the drive resulted in two partitions, although I did not partition it. The Master drive (also 160 GB) was partitioned by Hewlett Packard where one partition of 5.50 GB was created to store recovery files. In Disk Management the following appears:

Volume Layout Type File System Status Capacity

Drive 0 Master C: Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (System) 147.14 GB
HP-Recovery D: Partition Basic FAT32 Healthy 5.50 GB

Disk 1 Slave K: Partition Basic NTFS Healthy (Page File) 147.36 GB
............. Partition Basic ............. Healthy 5.23 GB

The small partition on Disk 1 has no drive letter and the File system is blank.

Upon right clicking this partition the screen that comes up has only "Help" and no other selections. Rescanning does not change anything.
The main partition on Disk 1 works fine.

Would appreciate how I could assign a drive letter and at the same time establish the file system.
Thanks for any advise.



BobbyDouglas -> RE: Partition has no drive letter (12/24/2006 19:54:10)

What did you use to partition it? Have you tried something like partition magic? You should be able to merge the two partitions together using a program like that. Window's disk management is fairly limited.



User169 -> RE: Partition has no drive letter (12/25/2006 17:43:55)

BobbyDouglas,
Actually I did not partition it, just formattting it. However, after formatting, I noticed that there is a small partition created. Is it possible that ity automatically followed how Disk 0 was partitioned. Is it possible that the small partition was not formatted, that's why it was not assigned a drive letter and I could not access it?

I do not have Partition Magic. would Norton Utilities be able to merge the two partitions together, evben though one was not formatted?



BobbyDouglas -> RE: Partition has no drive letter (12/25/2006 23:10:35)

quote:

Is it possible that the small partition was not formatted, that's why it was not assigned a drive letter and I could not access it?

- That's what it sounds like. But it is odd that a new drive would have that small partition when you format it. It should have been a completely clean drive. The only thing that makes sense is that your computer's main drive decided to put a copy of the backup software on that drive as well.

I'm not sure about Norton Utilities. Partition Magic is a Symantec product, so I doubt they would let you do it using Norton Utilities too.

If you don't care about the contents on your drive, you can boot onto a floppy and do a complete format and then re-install of XP. A program like partition magic would be able to erase the contents on the small partition, and then merge the two partitions together (basically resize the large one to take up the full drive). I am not away of any good free programs to do this, but you might want to check out Google before you go buy something.



rdouglass -> RE: Partition has no drive letter (12/26/2006 13:08:04)

quote:

was partitioned by Hewlett Packard


A lot of HP/Compaq stuff comes with a small DOS partition to store their (proprietary) utility software (SmartStart and stuff like that).

**Just as a note if you didn't know. You can create partitions that don't use drive letters but rather 'mount points'. Did you go into Disk Manager (Windows) and view the properties to see if it was an NTFS mount point perhaps? Either way, if it's a new drive, I'd go bobby's suggestion and 'toss' or merge it.

</$.02>



User169 -> RE: Partition has no drive letter (12/27/2006 17:18:18)

Thanks to BobbyDouglass and rDouglass . Disk Manager does not indicate the Type FAT32 or NTFS for this small partition. As indicated right-clicking this small partition in Disk Manager only showed "Help", nothing else.



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