USB3 External Drive not vsisible

UncleZen

I have this Seagate 1TB USB3 external drive that I backup stuff to.
I used Macrium 5 to clone my hard disk to the USB3 drive, then realised thats not what I wanted to do.
I went to use it and only 495GB was visible, This seemed to be because Macrium had cloned my hard disk into an exact copy on the USB drive - formatting doesnt get me back the full 1TB.
So I started playing around with the disk management, by trying to delete and extend partitions, and now seem to have no usable USB disk at all !

Disk management tells me that my Disk 1 is 465GB unallocated | 450MB Healthy (recovery partition) | 465GB Unallocated
What I'm expecting is something like: One single Healthy (Active, Primary partition).
How to I get it back to that?

esuhl

I find that GParted is more reliable when you have partitioning problems. It runs on Linux, but there's a live CD/USB version here too:

https://gparted.org/livecd.php

unforeseen

Delete the recovery partition. That should then give you the full 1TB as a single unallocated chunk. Now create a part ion and accept all defaults and it should create a single 1TB parti on. Now format that.

UncleZen

Win10 wouldn't allow me to delete any of the partitions.
I'm going to make a Windows repair cd today to see if any of the tools help.
I'll also have a go with gparted as well.

unforeseen

Disk part run as admin may do it but make sure you select the right disk before doing the clean command.

UncleZen

Sussed it, used DISKPART from a cmd prompt with a few pointers from this article:


https://www.lifewire.com/delete-windows-recovery-partition-4128723