Hi forum! I have a VISTA laptop. I'm setting up an external harddrive for backup purposes. The external harddrive has 2 partitions on it. Because I'm using the harddrive for data backup, I want to remove the partitions to make it one large drive. Currently, the drive names are "F:" and "G:". I'm using McAfee's shredder software to remove any pre-existing data. I'll then reformat it. How do I remove the partitions to make it one large drive? Thank you for your help! bluezcruizer

Correct me if my understanding is wrong. 1. This laptop has one hard drive partitioned Drive C (system) & Drive D (Factory Restore) and one DVD drive as drive E. 2. You have external USB hard drive partitioned as drive F & G. Is the above info right? i_Xp/VistaUser

Just go into Disk Management. Delete the existing partions and recreate a single partition from the unused space. Then format. You will end up with a single drive that will be drive F: Just make sure you dont delete any partitions on the internal drive. Stuart

That's correct; seperate external harddrive for backup purposes. I can't locate any "disk management" function on my system. Please elaborate -- thank you guys!

I did some looking, and found out disk management is in the administration tools of the control panel. I've got a new problem...I think I deleted one too many drive letters and now the drive doesn't show up in the drive management section at all. It does, however, show up in the device manager as a second HDD. I just can't do anything with it; including initializing it. Any ideas, or did I just FUBAR it bad?