Hi, I've just fitted a HDD from my old desktop to an external enclosure to use it as an external USB drive. This drive has a number of partitions on it that I would like to remove. It's been quite a few years since I've done this sort of thing and quite frankly, I've forgotten how to do it! (It's an age thing!). The "drives" I'm trying to recover into one were last formatted and partitioned using Win 2000 (don't know if makes any difference, but it shows how long ago I did it!) I've had a look in 'Computer Management' but got nowhere. Any guidance most welcome. Tim

Install the drive to the computer using a good USB port. Start > r. clk. "my Computer" > select "manage" > select "disc management" In the bottom right window select the correct drive and partition and R,clcik the partition window then select "delete partition! do this to all the partitions you wish to remove. Each partition that you remove will become "unallocated space" this space can then be left whole and formated as a new partition or the drive can become a single partition. When you are done format the spaces. Obama's Spread the Wealth I gave my waitress' tip to a homeless person. She has a better understanding!

In addition to the above you may want to format using FAT32, depending on what other computers you will use the drive on. No OSes prior to Win2000 can read NTFS partitions. Additionally, Win98 has a size limit of 127GB.

Blimey, that was a bit different! Last time I partitioned a drive it was a DOS interface. Thank you. With this new found confidence I'm going to strip out the other drive in my old desktop and use it to boot into Ubuntu. (I'll have to re-take the poll!) Thanks once again. Tim

>> No OSes prior to Win2000 can read NTFS partitions. << Except Windows NT. But then nobody is still using Wndows NT are they? You never know though, peple are still using DOS and that is even older. Stuart

Stuart You are half right. NT4.0 used NTFS. NT3.51 used a different file format, which I can't recall the name. You are correct in your assessment that probably no one reading this thread cares about either of those OSes. BTW, correct me if I am wrong about NT3.51 as I am going strictly by my 64 year old memory.

OtheHill NTFS was introduced with NT 3.1 sometime in the early 1990s. It was derived from the HPFS which came with OS/2 when IBM and Microsoft fell out over the development of OS/2. The earlier versions of NTFS were incompatible with the later versions without an OS patch. All varieties of NT could only do FAT16 as well as NTFS. FAT32 first came along with Windows 95. My 62 year old memory is just a tad better than your 64 years. :-) Stuart