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Forum Discussion
Reuse of old NAS disks. How to proceed
I have a Pioneer Pro which used to be all 2TB disks. I have started to upgrade those to 3TB disks. No problems there.
As I pull out the 2TB disks I figure I could use them as regular disks in a windows 7 system.
Problem is when I do this I can't understand how to format them so they are visible in windows. I'm guessing they are not NTFS after being in the NAS or something.
They do show up in Disk Managment. Looks like this
Disk 1
Basic
1863.02 GB
Online
When I right click here everything is greyed out except Convert to Dynamic disk and Properties
It has 3 partitions
4.00 GB Healthy (Primary Partition)
512 MB Healty (Primary Partition)
1858.51 GB Healthy (Primary Partition)
When I right click on any of the 3 partitions the choices are all greyed out except delete volume.
Above under volume each partition have their own disk symbol (but no name or letter).
Layout is Simple
Type is Basic
File System is blank
Status is Healthy (Primary Partition)
Capacity and Free Space is the numbers above
% Free is 100%
My question is. If I delete 2 of the partitions will I be able to expand the third (expand is greyed out now) and have the disk recognised in windows? I tried deleting the 512 MB partition and it went from blue to black as expected but the other partitions still have everything greyed out so I can't use the extend volume command to combine them.
Of course what I really wanna do is start over and just format the whole thing if possible.
Thanks for any advice on how to proceed.
As I pull out the 2TB disks I figure I could use them as regular disks in a windows 7 system.
Problem is when I do this I can't understand how to format them so they are visible in windows. I'm guessing they are not NTFS after being in the NAS or something.
They do show up in Disk Managment. Looks like this
Disk 1
Basic
1863.02 GB
Online
When I right click here everything is greyed out except Convert to Dynamic disk and Properties
It has 3 partitions
4.00 GB Healthy (Primary Partition)
512 MB Healty (Primary Partition)
1858.51 GB Healthy (Primary Partition)
When I right click on any of the 3 partitions the choices are all greyed out except delete volume.
Above under volume each partition have their own disk symbol (but no name or letter).
Layout is Simple
Type is Basic
File System is blank
Status is Healthy (Primary Partition)
Capacity and Free Space is the numbers above
% Free is 100%
My question is. If I delete 2 of the partitions will I be able to expand the third (expand is greyed out now) and have the disk recognised in windows? I tried deleting the 512 MB partition and it went from blue to black as expected but the other partitions still have everything greyed out so I can't use the extend volume command to combine them.
Of course what I really wanna do is start over and just format the whole thing if possible.
Thanks for any advice on how to proceed.
1 Reply
- The 4GB partition is for the OS, the 512MB partition is for the swap and the largest partition is for the data volume. The disks are partitioned for Linux software RAID.
Maybe try deleting all three partitions on a disk and then creating a new one filling the disk.
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