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Disk Size WD Elements

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I have a Western Digital Elements external drive.  It's supposed to be a 600 Gig drive.  However, ADD shows it as being 2TB.

 

When I try to merge the two partitions I get an error, and won't let me.  Does anyone know how I can do it?  My guess is that I can't because the disk size is locked by the HDD firmware, but I thought I'd check.

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Jeff:

WARNING!!! Do not use the Merge or Split functions in Disk Director, or any other partitioning software for that matter, unless you like playing Russian Roulette. These functions ought to be removed from the program; there have been too many cases where the user was left with nothing but a blank disk after some part of the merge or split went south.

To merge two partitions A and B into partition A, the program first has to copy all of the data from B to A. If it all won't fit, it has to do it a little bit at a time, resizing the two partitions on the fly. When all of the data has been removed from B, the B partition is then deleted. Finally, the A partition is resized to fill the space formerly occupied by A and B combined. As you can imagine, there are a huge number of possibilites for disaster if you let this process procede on autopilot.

Your best approach is to do it manually. First copy all of the data on the second partition to either external storage or to the first partition, if it will fit. After you have removed all of the data from the second partition, and it is completely empty, use Disk Director (DD) to delete the second partition. Right-click on the second partition and choose "Delete". Commit the operation by clicking on the checkered flag.

Finally, right-click on your first partition and choose "Resize". Drag the slider to the right to increase the size of the first partition until it is the desired size. Commit the operation. Now copy back any data that you moved to temporary storage, if any.

If one of these partitions contains your operating system, then do any operations on this partition from the boot CD so that Windows does not interfere. Also, be sure to back up all of your data before doing any partition operation; this is good practice even though most operations can be done safely.

Jeff,

If the drive is really 600GB and it's being shown as 2TB, something isn't right.

What does Disk Management show?

Could you post some screenshots (DD and Disk Management)?

Fortunately, I was smart enough to move all of my data off from the drive befor eI did anything to it.  Unfortunately, I may have already turned it into a paper weight.

I after moving all of the data I tried to perform a merge operation, and now DD does not even see the drive.  I am currently trying to format it NTFS via windows.  If that does not get it, I have a few other HDD utilities thatI can try.  Hopefully I didn't just build a brick.  I'll keep you posted.

If Disk Management can still see the drive, the it's probably okay. DD sometimes has problems seeing drives if it detects something odd.

What version of Windows are you using?

I'm running WinXP.  Windows could not format the disk.  PowerQuest 8 doesn't like it either.  Not sure what to try next...  Glad I moved all of my data.

Jeff:

Try the Western Digital diagnostics software. I see that they also have an External USB/FireWire FAT32 Formatting Utility that you could try.