DF-21 Forums

[Barry Brien]

I talked a bit about this in the editing forum, but I'll see how I get on in here.

I recently accidentally killed my laptop with liquid. I managed to save the hard drive and stick it into an enclosure. It is now an external hard drive. The only problem is that the hard drive was partitioned and I want to get rid of this partition. Is there any way of doing this without losing the data? The data on C: is all I want, the data on D: is only recovery stuff which I won't be needing. I can read both drives fine on my housemates computer, its just that for whatever reason my crappy work computer will only recognise the recovery drive and not the drive I want. I was hoping I wouldnt have to back up all the data first because my housemates computer is pretty crappy too

[Tsophika]

The tool you want to use is named diskpart, which can be run from the command prompt.

To extend a partition is has to be NTFS formatted. If it's FAT32 you're better off backing up the files and reformatting the whole drive.

If it is indeed NTFS I can walk you through the steps.

[The MAZZTer]

[Edit: After reading your other thread, you really don't need to deal with partitions since you just want to get data off the drive anyway. Just boot from a live CD in Linux and you should have access to all the partitions.]

Any partitioning tool can delete partitions. It's the EASIEST part of partitioning (you notice how building construction takes months but building demolition takes seconds and looks a lot more fun? Yeah it's like that). Windows has the ability built in.

Right click Computer and click Manage.

Go to Storage > Disk Management in the tree on the left.

Bottom pane is the easiest to see the physical drives and how they are partitioned. Find your external drive, right click on the partition you want to erase and click "Delete partition".

Afterwards you should be able to click on the other partition and click "Expand" to make it take up the rest of the space! (If it's NTFS. If not it may not be available.)

[Barry Brien]

Thanks guys that was quick and painless. It is an NTFS drive but I don't see the option to expand. No big deal anyway, its only 10gb. Cheers!

[The MAZZTer]

Hmm you might need Vista for that. No matter, Linux can probably do it too. :p

_________________
http://www.mzzt.net/ | I am a respectable admin with a respectable sig.

[Barry Brien]

New problem - I cannot access the files in my profile from my hard drive. C:\users\barry will not open for me. I didn't even have that profile passworded. I've tried altering the settings of the folder, but I get the same message - I don't have the 'priveliges'.
It's pretty annoying when a machine tells you that you're not 'priveliged' enough to access your own stuff. Any thoughts?

[Tsophika]

You need to "take ownership" of those folders.

http://www.vista4beginners.com/Change-permissions-take-ownership

[The MAZZTer]

Yeah first you need an Administrator account to adjust these.

Next, you right click the drive root (or the problematic folder, but chances are you will run into more before long) and click Sharing and Security.

If the property dialog has no Security tab, congratulations, you have to reboot into safe mode and log in using the "Administrator" account first before it will appear. Aren't you glad you bought the cheap version of Windows that requires you to do this?

Anyways, in the Security tab, go to Advanced. Go to the owner tab, and select your user or a group you are a member of (Administrators is a good choice). If you just select your user it will be useless when you create a new profile (IE when you reinstall Windows) and you'll have to repeat this ALL OVER AGAIN as I know from personal experience, so it's best to use Administrators.

Then click Apply and wait for it to propagate the changes to every file on the drive (could take a while).

When it comes back, close the dialog and go back to that Security tab. If there is an entry for Administrators, click it and click "Full Control / Allow". If not, click Add, type in Administrators and click ok, and then click "Full Control / Allow".

You can also repeat this to add Read privileges to the User group if you so desire, or add Full Control to the user group based on what security settings you want to enforce (if you care).

Oh yeah this will have the side effect of breaking security on System Restore if you do it on the drive root... that is, malware and viruses will be able to easily infect it since access to it is open now. To reset that security, hit the properties for the System Volume Information folder, remove all entries from Security except SYSTEM, which should have full control. Click OK.

Incidentally Linux ignores NTFS security settings.

[Tsophika]

I think you misunderstood what I wrote. Or maybe I wasn't clear.

A low-level format, as some call it, will not cause problems. Converting a FAT32 drive to NTFS will.

Platters get damaged over time, internal parts wear. Reorganizing the file tree will affect the entire partition. You do run the risk of data loss, especially on older drives. I work in a facility that refurbishes Acer/Gateway machines. Not that we see many FAT systems anymore, but a conversion is never the recommended action.

But nobody needs to worry since Barry's drive is already NTFS. I hope we've helped get you sorted out.

[The MAZZTer]

I was commenting about your bit about overwriting the entire drive with 0s. Backing up and then converting the drive is going to be a bit more convenient than backing up, formatting, and restoring. And if it doesn't work you have your backup.

Oh, and converting is probably going to write to the drive less than reformatting and recopying files. It depends on how they implemented it. Ideally, they can just replace the header and the file allocation table, pointing to the same old file data. I don't know about the low-level structure of such things though so it might be more work.

Even if it does write the whole drive over it's still no worse than formatting and rebuilding the drive from backup.

_________________
http://www.mzzt.net/ | I am a respectable admin with a respectable sig.

[Barry Brien]

Oh yeah everything's perfect thanks! I was able to access the files no problem once I had it plugged into a computer that was running under an admin account.
My work laptop is a piece of crap, my housemates laptop isn't. Thanks again guys.