Fast Fixes Partitions

Your PC’S capacity is smaller than expected

If your new PC’S hard drive doesn’t appear to have all the storage stated in its specifications, your computer’s manufacturer may have included a recovery partition, which lets you restore your PC to its factory condition. To check, click Start, right-click Computer and choose Manage. Next, click Storage, then Disk Management. In the bottom of the right-hand pane you’ll see a graphic of your drive partitions, along with their drive numbers. Here, you should see a partition named Recovery.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Windows calculates capacity in terms of 1,024 kilobytes per megabyte, 1,024 megabytes per gigabyte and so on. Drive manufacturers, however, typically use 1,000KB instead. So, if a drive advertised as 4TB is reported by Windows as 3.7TB, the “missing” 300GB is down to the way capacity is calculated.

You can’t delete your recovery partition

Manufacturers usually mark recovery partitions as protected, which effectively prevents the Disk Management tool from doing anything with them – including letting you delete them. This is often a problem when you want to re-purpose an old drive. The solution is to use the built-in Windows tool Diskpart, which integrates with the Command Prompt, to wipe everything.

Click Start, type cmd and press Enter. In the Command Prompt window, type diskpart and press Enter, then type list disk and press Enter. Diskpart then displays a list of all your drives, labelled

Deleting a partition doesn’t free up space

You would expect that deleting a partition from your PC would automatically make the freed-up space usable. In fact, it’ll remain invisible to Windows until you create a new partition, or instruct an existing partition to extend itself into the available space. You can carry out both of these tasks using Disk Management. Right-click an existing partition and click Extend Volume or, to create a new partition with its own drive letter, right-click the unallocated partition and choose New Simple Volume, then follow the prompts.

Windows won’t let you create large partitions

If you find you’re unable to create partitions bigger than 32GB, it’s probably because your hard drive has been formatted using the FAT32 file system. This will often be the case if you have an old PC or you’ve fitted a drive from an old PC.

The solution is to format your hard drive to use the newer NTFS file system (and lose all your data), or convert it (and preserve your data).

To format it, launch Windows Explorer or File Explorer (press Win+e), then right-click the drive and choose Format. Choose NTFS from the ‘File system’ menu, then click Start. If you plan to go down this route, make sure you back up all your data and create a system restore point first.

Alternatively, preserve your data by choosing to convert the drive instead. Open the Command Prompt (type cmd, then press Enter), type convert DRIVELETTER: /fs:ntfs, replacing DRIVELETTER: with the relevant drive letter (for example, convert d: /fs:ntfs). Press Enter, type a name for the drive and press Enter again. Close the Command Prompt window when complete.

Drive letters are in a strange order

Adding or removing partitions can lead to non-sequential drive letters (for example, C: followed by E: then G:). This isn’t a problem for Windows but it might be for your head (where is D:?). Or you might want to apply different drive letters for other reasons, such as assigning P: to the partition containing your photos.

It’s easy to change drive/partition letters, but be warned: this can play havoc with programs that have been set up to use a particular drive letter, so proceed with caution. In Disk Management, right-click the relevant partition, choose ‘Change Drive Letter or Path’ and then click the Change button. Choose the desired letter from the dropdown menu, then click OK followed by Yes. Never change drive C: (your local hard drive).

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